A monument

BOO]X$ er reading, and now that a paperback version is available will surely prove popular with engineering students, especially those working in manufacturing. Mike Doomer

D e s i g n and user needs Need assessment: A key to user-orientated product innovation. Holt, K, Geschka, H and Peterlongo, G, John Wiley, Chichester (1984). 187pp. £13.25 (hardback) and £4.95 (paperback) This is a positive and useful book. The first part of the book makes the case that successful product innovation relies on the capacity of companies to assess user needs. This argument is supported by reference to previous studies of innovation and to the author's own empirical research. The authors have carried out international comparisons of the mechanical equipment, electronics and consumable durables industries. This work shows that, the authors claim, the risk of failure is reduced 'by paying proper attention to the users and their needs throughout the innovation process from idea generation to market introduction'. Focus on user needs ensures 'better problem definition' and clear objectives for product innovation, 'better coordination' of the individuals and departments involved in product innovation and 'better marketing' of the product. The innovation studies, however, also reveal that most companies neglect the problems related to identifying user needs. In an attempt to improve this situation, the remainder of the book provides 'tools for systematic need assessment and their practical application'. The authors discuss what is meant by 'user needs'. They define user need as 'a lack of something that is wanted', and then go on to develop four dimensions of user needs. These

Vol 7 No 1 January 1986

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are 'existing needs', 'future needs', 'emotional (eg aesthetic, style, image) needs' and 'rational (function and use) needs'. Needs vary with different groups, people and overtime. How can this complex mass and mass of user needs be analysed and met by product innovation? A range of tools used by companies for need assessment are collated and presented in various ways. These are a general checklist of activities to attain a better understanding of existing needs and failure to meet these, for example, visiting exhibitions, reading trade literature, using information from service engineers, working closely with users, etc., creatively and forecasting methods to assess future needs and identify emotional needs, such as, brainstorming, presenting visual images and models to users, etc. and case-studies of how companies organise themselves to use the information they have acquired. Overall, the book is a very useful and general guide of how to assess user needs. It is a positive and stimulating approach to the problem. Often, assessment of user needs is recommended by those wishing to improve the success of innovations but equally as often with little or no account of how this can be done. The presentation and style of the book makes the ideas accessible and readable. Significantly too, the breadth of the assessment techniques covered in the book means that there are tools appropriate for companies of different sizes and different industries and for companies embarking on radical and incremental product innovations. However, the authors do not talk about the role of design in product innovation nor do they discuss whether the responsibility for assessing user needs should be that of a designer(s), even though designers are the people who need this information. Further, there is no systematic account of what the best practices of user assessment are and

how these relate to commercial and/ or design success. Nonetheless, the book is timely in that it moves away from an emphasis on technologypush and suppliers' needs to user needs as being central to successful product innovation. Margaret Bruce

A monument Pahl, G and Beitz, W Engineering Design (edited by K Wallace). The Design Council, London (1984). 450pp. £40.00. Pahl and Beitz (P & B) may be described as a monument of a book which, in this English version, comes in funeral black. The question which follows is inevitably 'To what is it a monument?'. It is in a European tradition of attempted comprehensiveness, reflecting a particular national culture and intellectual position within a special epoch. Comprehensiveness in this case may be taken as an intention to cover the main scope of engineering design, providing approaches which will be useful, as well as teachable, at all stages of design other than that of dealing with the minutiae of detail design. In order to provide evidence of comprehensiveness the book has to lay claim to applicability to all classes of engineering system, to deal with all aspects of the sequence of designing, and, especially, to provide useful aids at principal points. Some kind of logical interconnection has to be perceived to support this edifice. This book is set against the substantial background of German mechanical engineering. This means that although suggestions are made of generality with respect to the handling, processing, and dealing with all kinds of system inputs, whether information, matter, or energy, it fails to offer much to those branches of engineering which were active earlier in the span of system

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B©©K$ AND PJBLXCATX©N$ engineering such as electronics or chemical engineering. Although it is only partly to be seen as an a t t e m p t e d drawing together of engineering design under a broad system concept it is more clearly a monument to the achievement of something like a working concensus on the phases and sequences in designing as set out, for example, in VDI Richtlinie 2222 in the development of which the authors played a significant part. In a way the book is a detailed expansion of a view of Richtlinie 2222. What has to be recognised is that the German original was constructed at least seven years ago before the practical emergence of the microcomputer and cheap 32-bit CAD systems. The newer developments of rapid cost estimating in mechanical design had still to find acceptance and the detailed solution in principle by catalogues still had much distance to cover. Books such as this which attempt something like a comprehensive statement, although they may provide a good teaching base, tend to reflect a position which is becoming out of date, whether intellectually or practically. Inevitably there are questions regarding the kinds of design technology transfer which will usefully take place and how such will occur. The front-runners in the field of engineering design at the international academic level are already looking for new intellectual products. Some of these may be identified by examining the programme for ICED 85. Now that P & B has appeared in a thoughtful and carefully-prepared English translation, for which praise must be given, it is useful to sketch out some of its possible applications beyond that of serving as a monument. Clearly the book, within its scope, has some value as a reference book, whether for academics, practitioners, or managers. Practitioners may wish to try out some of the

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checklists, or to pursue the background of certain techniques further. They may, if they have time, try to find out what they might have overlooked in their own practice. For managers there is a base for the formulation of bureaucratic procedures. For academics there is the possibility of reducing the labour of preparing lectures. Various less obvious suggestions have been put forward regarding advantages from P & B. Thus, it provides some kind of common g r o u n d for discussion or communication between managers, practitioners and academics, or between members of working groups. There are hints that the use of some of the formalised procedures help to speed up design work. For such to be accepted research or practical underpinning would be desirable. But this is an area with pitfalls. It may be that as in attempts to check proposed new agricultural practices the test-site conditions are not reproducible elsewhere. Or there may be something like a 'Hawthorne effect' in which people improve their performance just because they have become a focus of attention. At the same time attention ought to be given to possible negative features arising from adoption of P & B procedures. In a way such are unresolved questions which attach to many of the techniques generated within the design methods framework. Another way of regarding such a monument is to see it as part of the infrastructure upon which new endeavours can be built, even if the monument provides only rubble for the new foundations. There is a possibility that having produced this attempted outline of European engineering design technology as perceived by leading academics in 1979 we may be able to move on to aspects of design technology which will help to solve the oncoming problems of industry and practitioners, particularly in the newer sectors of engineering. Sydney Gregory

The use of space Hillier, B and Hanson, J. The sociallogicof space, Cambridge Universi¢yPress, London (1984). £35.00. Like other designed artefacts buildings have both functional requirements and cultural significance; but they also have a further quality, they transform space, and therefore affect the interactions between people. The Social Logic of Space explores these transformations at two levels: first, society, either by design or through evolution, orders space in particular ways for its own purposes; secondly, space, once ordered, influences human behaviour. The research effort, of which this book is the first full explanation, has been going on for about a decade at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London, and in relative isolation. It draws only marginally on existing work of anthropol o g i s t s , g e o g r a p h e r s , and enviromental psychologists, and indeed is intended to be a wholly new theoretical approach. Its influences have come from linguistics and topology. From linguistics comes the idea of 'space syntax'; spaces may be located in relationship to one another according to syntactic rules. These relationships are topological ones, such as adjacency and contiguity. The methods which the authors have developed are intended to be both generative and analytical. Generative methods involve the combination of cells in accordance with 'local rules' and they are illustrated by the generation of two-dimensional rule-based patterns, which appear to have similarities with small scale plans of village settlements. The authors posit a relationship between these discovered generative rules and social forces. The analytical techniques are fully described and are illustrated with a range of historical and contemporary examples of buildings and settlements. Working from small scale

DESIGN STUDIES