Towards a Conceptual Framework for Predicting Engineering Design Team Performance Based on Question Asking Activity Simulation

Abstract

The product development process has undergone significant changes in the last two decades. Consumers have become more sophisticated in their choices, products have become more complex, and the barriers to entry to competitors have been significantly lowered. All this has resulted in an increased emphasis on creative teamwork and shorter product development times. In turn this has led to an increased number of descriptive studies of the engineering design process in the research community as well as the development of various tools and methods aimed at improving the process. Success in this endeavor has been a difficult battle for the research community and several authors have made attempts to analyze the obstacles responsible for the difficulty. Blessing for example notes:

“... identifying whether this [a method or tool] indeed contributes to success is far more difficult and the results are not easy to generalize. Success is difficult to measure other than in a real, industrial situation and action research in an industrial situation is notoriously difficult, let alone comparative action research. Furthermore, the success of a method or tool depends on the context in which it is being used. This context is different for every design process, because every design project is unique” (Blessing et al. 1998).