David G. Ullman - Designing quality into product development

Home
Design Process
Business Development
Books & Resources
Technical Training
Products
Patents
Resume
Contact

Books

The Mechanical Design Process, 4th edition, McGraw Hill, 2009

The new edition of the leading mechanical design book was published in January 2009. This new edition builds on the earlier editions' reputation for being concise, direct and for logically developing the design method with detailed how-to instructions while remaining easy and enjoyable to read.

Knowledge about the design process is increasing rapidly. A goal in writing the fourth edition was to incorporate this knowledge into a unified structure - one of the strong points of the first three editions. Throughout the new edition, topics have been updated and integrated with other best practices in the book.

This book conveys the "flavor" of design, addressing both traditional engineering topics as well as real-world issues like creative thinking, synthesis of ideas, visualization, teamwork, sense of customer needs and product success factors, and the financial aspects of design alternatives, in a practical and motivating manner.

Purchase details


12 Steps to Robust Decisions: Building Consensus in Product Development and Business, Trafford Publishing, 2001

Combining more than ten years of study of decision support, cognitive psychology, product development, business management and Artificial Intelligence concepts, Making Robust Decisions gives you the tools you need to produce optimal decisions-those that make good use of available information, achieve buy-in from all parties, and yield the best possible results. Packed with practical examples and case studies, Making Robust Decisions strikes a middle ground between self-help books that, while interesting in theory, may not help with real-world problems and highly technical analysis texts. It provides some methods you can implement right away and others that you and your organization can grow into. It is readable, useful, and readily applicable to a wide variety of decision-making problems. The methods can help with such varied issues as selecting a concept, managing a portfolio, choosing a vendor, evaluating a proposal, selecting from architecture options, choosing a design, and determining whether to make or buy an item

Purchase details


Selected Papers

"The Ideal Engineering Design Support System", written for AutoDesk 2000.

"What to do Next: Letting the Problem Status Determine the Course of Action@,  Research in Engineering Design, 1997 (9), pp 214-227.  Shortened version in Volume 2 of the proceedings of the International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED97,  Tampere, Finland, Aug 1997, pp 93-99.

"A Taxonomy for Engineering Decision Support Systems",  Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacture, AI EDAM, #9, 1995, pp 427-438.

"Recognize Features from Freehand Sketches@, Computers in Engineering, Vol 1, 1994, pp 67-78.

"A Data Representation for Collaborative Mechanical Design," Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 3, No. 4, 1992, pp. 233-242.

"The Evolution of Commitments in the Design of a Component," Journal of Mechanical Design, Vol. 144, March 1992, pp. 1-7.

"A Taxonomy for the Mechanical Design Process," Research in Engineering Design, Vol. 3, 1992, pp. 179-189.

"Fundamental Processes of Mechanical Designers Based on Empirical Data," Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 2, No. 2, 1991, pp. 113-126.

"The Information Requests of Mechanical Design Engineers," Design Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, January 1991, pp. 42-50.

"The Design Capture System:  Capturing Back-of-the-Envelope Sketches," Journal of Engineering Design, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1990, pp. 339-353.

"The Importance of Drawing in the Mechanical Design Process," Computers and Graphics, Special Issue on Features and Geometric Reasoning, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1990, pp. 263-274.

"A Model of the Mechanical Design Process Based on Empirical Data," Academic Press, Artificial Intelligence in Engineering Design and Manufacturing, 2(1), 1988, pp. 33-52.

© 2009 David Ullman