David G. Ullman - Designing quality into product development

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Books

The Mechanical Design Process, 3rd edition,McGraw Hill, 2003

The third edition of The Mechanical Design Process is the best selling text on designing mechanical product. It combines a practical overview of the design process with case material and real-life engineering insights. Ullman's work as an innovative designer comes through consistently, and has made this book a favorite with readers.

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. Its ongoing use of a bicycle design case brings the design stages and concepts to life, and shows the actual steps taken to generate design ideas and bring them to fruition. Approaches to concept generation, including TRIZ and axiomatic design, are given strong coverage.

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

This is a book of techniques to help organizations make robust decisions. It focuses on how to make the best possible choice with the knowledge, people, and time available. It provides methods that help answer four key questions, asked either consciously or unconsciously, every time a decision is made:

What is the best alternative?
Do we know enough to make a good decision yet?
What do we need to do next to feel confident about the decision within the limited resources?
Is there team consensus about the decision?

It makes no difference what subject the problem addresses; the questions above still apply and generally are not easy to answer. Often, the quality of the decision is only revealed by the passage of time, and then it is too late to change the decision. This book is focused on helping us answer these questions as part of the decision-making process, not as a post-mortem to a poor decision.

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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.