The Power of Early
By Dr. Joel Orr, VP and Chief Visionary, Cyon Research Corporation

I am not a designer. Perhaps that is why I have always been awed by the design process, that messy and mysterious string of events by which something is created out of nothing.

When I was younger, I badgered every designer I met to explain to me how design works. "Do you have a formula into which you plug all the requirements?" I demanded. They'd laugh. "We seldom even know all the requirements."

"Well, does your company have a set of check-lists you use?" I persisted. More laughter.

In those pre-Google days, I haunted libraries and bookstores, trying to find something called, "How to Design Anything," or "The Secrets of Design." Nada.

Eventually, it began to dawn on me that "design" was something of a fiction, a category containing only other categories--"design of bumpers"; "design of houses"; "design of integrated circuits"; and so on--but no generic rules.

During this search, I needed a definition. I didn't like any of the ones I found, so I made one up: Design is the ordering and communicating of intention. (I contrasted this with art, which I defined as the directing of attention.)

Like human conception, gestation, and birth, it is a messy process, with imperfectly predictable outcomes.

In business and government, design is usually part of a process leading to manufacturing or construction of something. It begins as an abstract notion, a set of requirements, and leads to something concrete.

It is not deterministic. Given a set of requirements, there is nothing inevitable about the resultant design.

Rather, it is a matter of trial and error--or what my friend, engineering guru Bill Livingston, calls, "SCRBF--short-cycle run-break-fix." He goes on to say, "The only alternative to SCRBF is long-cycle run-break-fix."

Various parts of the design-to-production process have been automated. Computer-aided drafting became for engineers what the typewriter was for secretaries; it was--and generally still is--little more than an outboard motor on a drafting board.

Engineering data management has come a long way, first automating the drawing vault, then the part catalog, configuration management, and more. And Web access has opened these up to remote locations and outsourcing partners.

Project management support, with its PERT, Gantt, and other charts, as well as resource-leveling and time-tracking, is now both sophisticated and cheap. It links to cost accounting and other project functions, often seamlessly.

Computer-aided analysis has eliminated tremendous computational drudgery. Computer-aided manufacturing brought speed and precision to manufacturing.

You get the general idea. Computers have increased the efficiency of engineering and production.

But are we applying them wisely? Consider:

• 80% of the cost of a design-to-production project is determined in the first 5% (time-wise) of the project;
• At the beginning of a project, the designer knows little or nothing about the design, but has complete freedom; by the time the designer learns something about the design, there is very little freedom left to change anything;
• The design is never finished; you just run out of time;
• The cost of fixing a mistake rises exponentially from the beginning of a design project until the design is produced and deployed.

There's a message in these well-known observations, but it is seldom taken to heart. The message is simply that focusing on the earlier part of the process has the potential to yield far greater productivity improvements than anything that can be done in the later stages.

No amount of refinement of production processes can match the potential improvement yielded by a superior design.

And yet--computer-aided design is a myth, a cruel naming joke perpetrated by marketers. All CAD systems do is help the designer create geometry more easily and quickly than before. Nothing in CAD contributes much to the enhancement of the conception of a design.

There have been efforts--one outstanding example is the Altshuller TRIZ methodology promoted by Invention Machine Corporation. Yet it has not seen wide acceptance, despite some amazing customer success stories.

Why is this so? Why does the part of the design-to-production-to-deployment process that has the potential for the greatest improvement through automation get so little attention from both software vendors and users?

Could it be that conception is an inherently private matter? (Someone should tell Hollywood.) Is it that we don't really know what we do when we design, so we can't imagine how to automate even a portion of the process?

Or are we simply afraid of change?

I don't know the answers to these questions. But my daddy taught me, "Measure twice; cut once." The power of automation will now let us "measure twice"--or two million times--in the blink of an eye. I recommend we all devote more thought to the earliest parts of the design process. It is a place from which untold riches of productivity will yet be mined.