The science of failure prevention relies heavily on the experience of personnel on a project. As the nation is about to face a tremendous decline in the experienced workforce due to the baby boomer generation's retirement, it is critical to begin focusing on capturing their knowledge. Cataloging and communicating the knowledge of potential failures is critical to prevent engineering disasters. Many companies have adopted failure-reporting systems that allow them to record their engineering failures to promote failure prevention. While recording this information is vital to learning from past mistakes, often the information is not stored so that engineers and designers can easily recall this valuable linguistic information and use it to improve designs. Therefore, more effective systems for cataloging and utilizing corporate memory of recorded failure events are needed. This article presents the design of a computational linguistic database to support the failure prevention tool, the risk in early design (RED) method. RED promotes failure prevention by identifying failure risks as early as the conceptual phase of product design, where impacts of failure prevention are greatest. It uses a database populated by historical failure event information to present specific areas that are at risk of failure in a product.

This paper describes one experiment to test the utility of component functional templates as a functional modeling instruction aid. Previous research by the authors has shown that problems exist with students describing functional representations of a system or subsystems. Component functional templates were derived as a means of addressing this ongoing problem. The experiment was performed on a section of sophomore level undergraduate students and consisted of both a pre and post-test. During the pre-test, the students were divided into small groups of two or three and given the task of creating a functional model for a small consumer product. The lesson prior to the task was based only on a review of the functional modeling lesson taught in a freshman design course. After the pre-test, another lecture was provided that covered the use of the component functional templates. Next, for the post-test, the students were again asked to create a functional model of the same product. It was hypothesized that the use of the templates would provide better results in the quality and accuracy of the models when compared to the models produced without the use of the templates. The results of the experiment confirmed the hypothesis that the component function templates assist novice design students to create higher quality functional models and offer a foundational basis for further experimentation and evaluation.