Tutorial by Christopher Brown

Engineering design was transformed to scientific discipline by Suh’s discovery of the axioms. This tutorial provides a philosophical foundation for design based on axioms. It extracts the essence from Suh’s seminal book, The Principles of Design, to explain the fundamental theory of Axiomatic Design. It describes a process, which exploits the theory, to produce the best possible design solutions. The naturalness of Suh’s Axioms are discussed. Other design methods are algorithmic. They imply that a good process yields a good result, yet there is no philosophical or theoretical basis for this implication. Suh’s Axioms provide a scientific basis for evaluating the quality of a design, regardless of the process. Just as a free-body diagram is essential to the application of Newton’s Laws, an appropriate decomposition of the design problem is essential to the exploitation of axiomatic design. The hieratical decomposition process is described. In applying Axiomatic Design, design problems are decomposed into three, parallel domains: functional, physical, and process, from abstract to specific. The integration of the detailed components from the decomposition into a complete design solution, following the dictates of Suh’s Axioms, completes the tutorial.