On Validating Engineering Design Decision Support Tools

In this article, an argument for validation of design–decision methods is presented. In the process of justifying the need for validation, several criteria for a valid design–decision method are introduced. These criteria represent a starting point from which the research community can continue to debate and ponder the validation issue. Under these criteria, a critical empirical investigation of two popular decision support methods, the House of Quality and Suh’s Axiomatic Design, is presented via a simple design problem and both are shown to violate some portion of the proposed definition of validity. The goal of this article is to raise awareness of potential flaws in popular design–decision aids and to promote debate on design validation within the concurrent engineering research community.