Our Mission
Fact: The design decisions made by engineers impact the economy, the environment, and society. This impact is significant and can be positive or negative, depending on various factors and the perspective being considered.
Because the impact of engineering is real, and the stake are high, we believe that all engineers have a responsibility to thoughtfully design products, perform analysis, and present results that are cognizant of engineering’s wide impact on the world.
Our mission is to research and create methods that can be used to develop new and better products. We don’t assume that the best way to design a product/system has already been found. We believe that unexpected, practical, and better designs and design tools are waiting to be discovered and that our job is to find them. Our findings are shared through our publications, presentations, workshops, and the BYU Design Review.
Our research group members include Visiting Scholars, PhD candidates, MS students, MBA students, and BS students. Many of our members have had industrial experience.
What is Design Exploration?
We all want to design the best and most desirable products. Not surprisingly, the way we design them (i.e., the steps we take to conceive, develop, and commercialize a product) has a big influence on how desirable those products become.
Informally we can think of Design Exploration as a particular way of arriving at a desirable and often optimal design solution. Formally, Design Exploration is the human-driven, often computer-assisted, divergent/convergent process used to evolve and investigate multidisciplinary design space with the intent of design discovery and to inform decision making throughout the design process.
Progress
The Design Exploration Research group started in 2006, when we began developing design exploration tools that assist designers in making product and system decisions that optimize their benefit to humanity. Our projects range from multi-scale, multi-disciplinary, design and optimization of consumer products that are difficult to reverse engineer, to the design of adaptable income-generating products for the developing world. And our approaches range from computational and numerical to subjective and qualitative.
Since that time we have worked with collaborators and communities in the USA, the United Kingdom, Brazil, India, Peru, Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Spain, China. We played a fundamental role in the development of the Village Drill and the ongoing impact assessments of it. The Village Drill is now in more than 40 countries, and has impacted millions of people.
We believe our findings have been impactful. In fact, the most downloaded paper for the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design in 2019 was from the Design Exploration Research Group. Various parts of the research findings have been recognized with patents, publications, and prestigious awards including a Presidential Award from Barack Obama.