Our Mission
Fact: The design decisions made by engineers impact the economy, the environment, and society. This impact is significant and can be positive or negative, depending on various factors and the perspective being considered.
Because the impact of engineering is real, and the stake are high, we believe that all engineers have a responsibility to thoughtfully design products, perform analysis, and present results that are cognizant of engineering’s wide impact on the world.
Our mission is to research and create methods that can be used to develop new and better products. We don’t assume that the best way to design a product/system has already been found. We believe that unexpected, practical, and better designs and design tools are waiting to be discovered and that our job is to find them. Our findings are shared through our publications, presentations, workshops, and the BYU Design Review.
Our research group members include Visiting Scholars, PhD candidates, MS students, MBA students, and BS students. Many of our members have had industrial experience.
What is Design Exploration?
We all want to design the best and most desirable products. Not surprisingly, the way we design them (i.e., the steps we take to conceive, develop, and commercialize a product) has a big influence on how desirable those products become.
Informally we can think of Design Exploration as a particular way of arriving at a desirable and often optimal design solution. Formally, Design Exploration is the human-driven, often computer-assisted, divergent/convergent process used to evolve and investigate multidisciplinary design space with the intent of design discovery and to inform decision making throughout the design process.