What is the fundamental similarity between investing in stock of a company, because you like the products of this company, and selecting a design concept, because you have been impressed by the esthetic quality of the presentation made by the team developing the concept?
Except that both decisions are based on a surface analysis of the situations, they both reflect a fundamental human’s cognitive feature. Human brain is profoundly trying to minimize the efforts required to solve a cognitive task and is using when possible an automatic mode relying on recognition, memory, and causality. This mode is even used in some occasion without the engineer being conscious of it. Such type of tendencies are naturally pushing engineers to rush into known solutions, to avoid analyzing the context of a design problem, to avoid modelling design problems and to take decision based on isolated evidences. Those behaviors are familiar to experience teachers and engineers. This tendency is magnified by the time pressure imposed to the engineering design process. Early phases in particular have to be kept short despite the large impact of decisions taken at this stage. Few support tools are capable of supporting a deep analysis of the early design conditions and problems regarding the fuzziness and complexity of the early stage. The present article is hypothesizing that the natural ability of humans to deal with cause-effects relations push toward the massive usage of causal graphs analysis during the design process and specifically during the early phases. A global framework based on graphs is presented in this paper to efficiently support the early stages. The approach used to generate graphs, to analyze them and to support creativity based on the analysis is forming the central contribution of this paper.
