Iteration in Engineering Design: Inherent and Unavoidable or Product of Choices Made?

Iteration in design has different meanings, ranging from simple task repetition to heuristic reasoning processes. Determining the need to iterate is important to improve the design process on cost, time, and quality, but currently there is no categorization of iterations conducive to this goal. After exploring the possible causes and attempts to address them, we propose to classify iterations as rework, design, or behavioral. This framework suggests that design teams should try to eliminate rework iterations, perform design iterations without skipping abstraction levels, and do behavioral iterations in