Workshop aim:

The concept of function is an issue both in the academic community, where many different definitions of “function” and associated concepts, such as behaviour and affordance exist and in engineering practise, where thinking in functions is a vital part of product development. Many of the definitions and viewpoints have arisen from the development of prescriptive methodologies, such as the Pahl&Beitz methodology or axiomatic design by Nam Suh for engineering design. While many methodologies (e.g. Pahl&Beitz) or theoretical frameworks like function-behaviour-structure are well known in the academic community, their uptake in industry has been disappointing even though many of concepts have influenced engineers through teaching at university.

Last summer the conference chairs conducted a series of experiments with engineers from the University of Karlsruhe, whose result show divergent concepts of functions although these engineers had received very similar training.

This experiment is just a snapshot, but it provides an insight into the difficulties people face with using a functional description of a product. For these highly trained young engineers the concept was problematic and in spite of systematic training they were not able to apply functional descriptions consistently.

This workshop aims to have a dialogue about what can be done to help engineers to think and work in functional terms, from different perspectives. We are hoping to gather researchers who have contributed to the recently very lively debate on functions in the academic community, as well as those who have worked with methods or tools requiring functional breakdowns and may have struggled with it.

We are interested on mature research as well as experience from practice, which has not yet been published or incidental to other research. In an international work context we are also interested in the different perspectives of people from different countries and languages.

We want to place the focus of this workshop on humans understanding and using functions, rather than automatic systems reasoning with functions and new methods using diverging definitions of functions.
Issues discussed could include the following research questions:

      ·         Origins of existing conceptions of function (linguistic, disciplinary, area of application etc.)
      ·         Barriers of functional thinking
      ·         Related concepts of function that need to be included or differentiated
      ·         Effects of diverging concepts in practise
      ·         Potential benefits of using multiple definitions/representations of function in designing


Workshop format:

The workshop discussions will be kicked off with a short presentation (5 minutes) of the experimental finding of the workshop chairs showing the range of different informal definitions of function and motivate the discussion. Selected 5 – 10 min presentations by about 5 participants will go into more detail at particular issues. These presentations will be scheduled to move the conversation on to different issues. This topic would be well suited for a special issue on functions, and the discussion about inform an editorial.


Submission information:

Potential contributors are asked to submit a one page summary presenting new research on functions, including the challenges that they see in working with functions in practice and clearly stating the research perspectives they come from as well as the goals they are persuing through their design research. The committee will select suitable contributions for presentations. The one page statements will be collated as workshop proceedings and should provide a picture of the variety of different views.

Submission shall be sent to c.m.eckert@open.ac.uk