How Things fit Needs

Edited book, 2007

Modern product development is characterised by cross-functional collaboration, parallel development processes and computer aided evaluation. While demands on a product’s performance, price and quality have steadily risen, the product’s life-cycle has shortened and international competition hardened. Growing complexity and the need for ever shorter production times call for maximum efficiency in development work. A range of different specialist skills are interwoven to reach system and overall solutions. Both analytical and synthetic design methods are employed to identify present and future demands and to ‘humanise’ the technology needed to solve present and future problems. But design work offers no single linear method of approach. Each development process is a novel and integral interplay. It is the task of the designer to control this interplay while maintaining a view to the overall product. The Industrial Design Engineering programme at the Chalmers University of Technology is an answer to this development – an interdisciplinary engineering training aimed at the planning and development of industrially manufactured products and production systems. The catalogue gives an overview about works carried out in 2006/2007.