From the beginning of creation, human being was surrounded by nature. Everything in nature is well organized and in harmony with the other parts of it. Through the history, nature has been always a source of inspiration for the human begin in different aspects of their life. Architecture as one of the remarkable features in every society cannot be separated from nature. In architecture design...

This paper presents an approach to support computer-aided conceptual design of mechatronic assemblies in a collaborative, multi-user environment. We describe a system, Conceptual Understanding and Prototyping (CUP), that allows a team of design engineers, collaborating over the Internet, to develop a high-level structure-function-behavior (S-B-F) description of an assembly in a VRML-based virtu...

The product development process is concerned, not only with the design of products, but with how these products are manufactured, distributed and serviced. Engineering conceptual design can be de ned as that phase of the product development process during which the designer takes a speci cation for a product to be designed and generates many broad solutions to it. Each of these broad solutions ...

Conceptual design involves requirements analysis, functional specification, and architectural design. It remains informal and poorly understood. We studied the conceptual design activities of a representative industrial software project, Centauri, for three months with follow-up observations and discussions over the following six months. Our goal was to understand how patterns of collaboration ...

  In this paper, authors tackle three very important questions that need to be answered if a theory of design is to be constructed. The first is what designers do, Which we attempt to illustrate with the help of case studies and theories of design practice. The second question is what guides designers. Here, authors try to present some of the proposed normative positions about design, to show t...