The study of the design process, design theory and methodology has been a preoccupation of engineers, designers and researchers over the last four to five decades. As the end of this millenium is approached and with the renewed interest around the world in engineering design, it is fitting to examine the state of the art and current status of issues relating to design philosophies, theory and methodology. Over the last 40 years, many approaches to design have been put forward by various researchers, designers and engineers, both in academia and industry, on how design ought to and might be carried out. These proposals on design have tended towards what has come to be regarded as design philosophies, design models and design methods. The thesis of this paper is to discuss various aspects of generic research in design, within the above classifications in the light of the work that has been done in the last four decades. Discussions will focus on various definitions of design, design theory and methodology, the nature and variety of design problems, design classifications, philosophies, models, methods and systems.

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Successful past design is the largest accumulation of expertise in the entire manufacturing sector and effective exploitation needs to structure this store of information. This paper shows that the design model under which this information is going to be used greatly influences the structuring process. Within design function deployment past designs should be structured as (a) a product concept, (b) a solution concept, (c) an embodiment design and (d) a detailed design, for efficient reuse. Illustrative examples are provided to explain their reuse. The methods for representing the structured information are also described.

This paper reviews the current research that has been carried out under the 'design reuse' umbrella. It classifies and discusses the work carried out in design reuse under seven categories, namely:(a) focused innovation, (b) cognitive studies on design reuse, (c) computational perspective of design reuse, (d) use of standard components, (e) design reuse tools and methods, (f) design reuse systems and (g) issues in design reuse.In the light of this discussion it proposes future areas of work to enable design reuse to become an accepted tool for systematic design.

Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a technique which was developed in Japan, has often been claimed to be the fundamental tool which helped the Japanese industry to achieve supremacy over the industries in the West QFD was introduced in the West in the mid 1980's and a decade has passed since its introduction Since its inception, varying degrees of success have been reported on its use This paper describes the technique, looks at the published material on the applications of QFD and analyses them From the analysis, ensuing discussions focus on ways to enhance this already powerful tool in the future, in order to extend its capabilities