Abstract
Frequent and effective design evaluation is foundational to the success of any product development effort. Products that will be used, installed, or otherwise handled by humans would benefit from both an evaluation of the product itself (the physical embodiment of the technology, termed technology), and the steps a user should take to use that technology (termed tactics). Current methods for the evaluation of tactics are scattered across multiple research areas, and are often inaccessible to engineers who have no prior experience with them. Furthermore, the existing tactics evaluation methods often focus mostly on the use of a product and do not simultaneously consider technological performance. In this paper we present a method for the simultaneous evaluation of tactics and technology during the conceptual design stage. To achieve this, we propose three contributions; an approach for representing tactics concepts, a set of criteria for tactics evaluations, and a means for presenting the results of the technology/tactics evaluation to facilitate team ideation.
