A Speech Act Theory-based information model to support design communication through annotations
✍ Scribed by Onur Hisarciklilar; Jean-François Boujut
- Book ID
- 104015627
- Publisher
- Elsevier Science
- Year
- 2009
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 523 KB
- Volume
- 60
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0166-3615
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Engineering design processes are becoming more and more complex. For many years, successful design methodologies based on the decomposition of these processes into sub-processes or tasks have been developed in order to deal with complex design situations. Companies have implemented design procedures in order to control the quality of the design process and eventually assess the quality of the product. However, today's market environment requires more than complex procedures in order to assess the quality of the product. New organisations based on concurrent engineering principles involve the co-operation of an increasingly high number of stakeholders from different fields of expertise during the design process.
Thus, many researchers today point out the importance of team work in design, and consider the design activity as a social process, and the design team as a social organisation . Researchers tend to explore knowledge creation and sharing within the design process, in order to understand and manage social interactions between participants. Pahl and Beitz argue that it is knowledge that links design participants and enables them to undertake actions and make decisions that direct the process and determine its outcome. The quality of human expertise and the ability to retrieve and use knowledge throughout the design process are crucial to the outcome .
On the other hand, artefacts have a capital role to create, represent and share knowledge in a concurrent design context, being the main objects of conversation between actors [5], and providing the links between them [6]. Today, many powerful tools (such as CAD, CAM or simulation tools) are widely used in industry, which aim to produce these materials. According to Vinck and Jeantet , these artefacts are used as intermediary objects, i.e. they are related to the action itself (i.e. the product), and they are a means of co-ordinating designers' activities. Star [9] stresses their role as boundary objects, allowing the expression of a shared knowledge between cross-domain actors.
However, communication between actors involved in these organisations is still inefficient. In fact, actors are spending a large part of their time seeking, organising, modifying and translating information, often unrelated to their own personal disciplines . In spite of the multitude of computer-supported tools which aim to support specific issues during the design processes, there is very limited number of tools dedicated to support design communication and argumentation processes. Actors often need to be provided with a means of developing more systematic cooperation around product representations and more adapted information to the context of use .
The aim of this paper is to describe an annotation-based information model around design representations. The model tends to promote a more successful co-operation between design actors and enables them to share design knowledge more systematically in asynchronous communication. We develop a linguistics pragmatics