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 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 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.

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What makes Design Exploration different than Design Optimization?

As described below, the essential difference between design optimization and design exploration is the assumptions about what is known before the search process begins.

Design optimization strategies have two distinct parts; formulate and converge. Here it is assumed that the problem can be formulated before the search and convergence begins. Design exploration strategies, on the other hand, are based on the belief that the problem formulation evolves during the process of searching and converging, thus ultimately leading to a more informed optimal solution. In this way, design exploration is both divergent and convergent.

Design optimization depends on a well-posed optimization problem formulation, which generally includes (i) a well-defined objective function, (ii) inequality and equality constraints, and (iii) the expression of stakeholder preference, all of which are likely to be multidisciplinary in nature. In an arguably real way, such a problem formulation predefines the optimum solution, thereby allowing the mathematical rigor of the optimization to lead to the optimum design by an iterative, computational search.

Design exploration, on the other hand, assumes that the optimal design is initially unknown and initially uncharacterizable. The process of design exploration discovers design conditions and little-by-little (often through some form of experimentation) characterizes what an optimal design looks like. Once this is known, the final solution can then be found through a convergent design optimization algorithm.

We view design exploration as an evolutionary step beyond the traditional convergent process of design optimization largely because it encourages and allows the human to remain in the loop during the divergent/convergent 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.

Our findings has been impactful, for example 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, prestigious awards including a Presidential Award from Barak Obama.