A Different Consideration on Information and Complexity in Axiomatic Design

from the article : To gain competitive power, product designs and their production means have become more and more complex over the past decennia. Product designers are faced with the increasingly difficult task to guarantee steady behavior of the systems they produce. This requires thorough understanding of the complex principles that determine the behavior of these products. It starts with notion how the many parts, of which the product design consists, are cross-linked with each other and their surroundings. If the design relations act predictable then the product design behaves predictable, and the functional requirements have high certainty of being satisfied. Axiomatic Design offers a number of ways to model the relations in a product design in order to improve its predictability. The ‘information content’ or ‘entropy’ of the design is indicative for the behavior of a system. The information content in Axiomatic Design is in the jurisdiction of the Information Axiom. This chapter investigates if information could be applied in a broader context; to bring the whole of methods in AD under a single heading. According to the definition of information by Shannon and Weaver, a broader application may be applied for Axiomatic Design. Along this path, an alternative framework of different kinds of information is decomposed that can be used to analyze progression in a product design. ‘Useful information,’ proportional to the ‘ignorance of the designer after application of all his knowledge,’ is decomposed into three kinds of information that are applied to graphically monitor the design process as it evolves.