Revisiting Design as an Information Processing Activity

Abstract

Information is both required and generated by engineering designers and engineering design teams. This is as part of the creation of a product or system. Controlling and managing this information is critical to the success of an overall product or system development programme. It is required for a variety of reasons such as controlling IP, ensuring conformance with regulations and performance regimes and to enable designs to be accepted and approved to pass various gated processes. Thus the argumentation put forward in this chapter is to reconceptualise engineering design as an information processing activity. This is being seen by companies and needs to be understood by engineering design researchers. This reconceptualisation is linked with the `information as thing' paradigm and is used to reinforce the requirements to accumulate information objects of a variety of types. This needs to be undertaken in a very formal manner. This approach can also be used to manage resource, suppliers and distributed design teams.