Functional Thinking : A Protocol Study

This book reports a protocol study that examines how designers construct function structure graphs as they understand and develop solution for novel design problems. Eight voluntary design engineers, with two to four years of experience in product design and function modeling are presented with a novel design problem for which they have to develop a functional models as a part of concept development, the modeling actions are videos recorded and the data is analyzed using a predefined protocol. The protocol is shown to be complete within the scope of the study and the coding scheme is validated with inter coder reliability analysis. The protocol analysis reveals patterns of occurrences of pauses in the modeling activity, elemental patterns such as Edge-Edge Text (E-ET), Block-Block Text (B-BT) which could help in understanding the designer's behavior and modeling activities such as chaining of the model. In aggregate, these observations provide insight into designers' thinking patterns while exploring solution to unseen problems using function structures.