Shipulski On Design

Good teachers change your life.  They know what you know and bring you along at a pace that’s right for you, not too slowly that you’re bored and not too quickly that your head spins. And everything they do is about you and your learning.  Good teachers prioritize your learning above all else.

Chris Brown taught me Axiomatic Design.  He helped me understand that design is more than what a product does.  All meetings and discussions with Chris started with the three spaces – Functional Requirements (FRs) what it does, Design Parameters (DPs) what it looks like, and Process Variables (PVs) how to make it. This was the deepest learning of my professional life.  To this day, I am colored by it.  And the second thing he taught me was how to recognize functional coupling.  If you change one input to the design and two outputs change, that’s functional coupling.  You can manage functional coupling if you can see it.  But if you can’t see it, you’re hosed.  Absolutely hosed.

Vicor Fey taught me TRIZ. He helped me understand the staggering power of words to limit and shape our thinking.  I will always remember when he passionately expressed in his wonderful accent, “I hate words!” And to this day, I draw pictures of problems and I avoid words.  And the second thing he taught me is that a problem always exists between two things, and those things must touch each other.  I make people’s lives miserable by asking – Can you draw me a picture of the problem?  And, Which two system elements have the problem, and do they touch each other? And the third thing he taught me was to define problems (Yes, Victor, I know I should say conflicts.) in time.  This is amazingly powerful.  I ask – “Do you want to solve the problem before it happens, while it happens, or after it happens?” Defining the problem in time is magically informative.

Don Clausing taught me Robust Design.  He helped me understand that you can’t pass a robustness test.  He said, “If you don’t break it, you don’t know how good it is.”  He was an ornery old codger, but he was right.  Most tests are stopped before the product fails, and that’s wrong.  He also said, “You’ve got to test the old design if you want to know if the new one is better.”  To this day, I press for A/B testing, where the old design and new design are tested against the same test protocol.  This is much harder than it sounds and much more powerful.  He taught me to test designs at stress levels higher than the operating stresses.  He said, “Test it, break it, and improve it.  And when you run out of time, launch it.”  And, lastly, he said, “Improve robustness at the expense of predicting it.”  He gave zero value to statistics that predict robustness and 100% value to failure mode-based testing of the old design versus the new one.

The people I work with don’t know Chris, Victor, or Don. But they know the principles I learned from them.  I’m a taskmaster when it comes to FRs-DPs-PVs.  Designs must work well, be clearly defined by a drawing, and be easy to make.  And people know there’s no place in my life for functional coupling.  My coworkers know to draw a picture of the problem, and it better be done on one page.  And they know the problem must be shown to exist between two things that touch.  And they know they’ll get the business from me if they don’t declare that they’re solving it before, during, or after.  They know that all new designs must have A/B test results, and the new one must work better than the old one.  No exceptions.

I am thankful for my teachers.  And I am proud to pass on what they gave me.

Image credit — Christof Timmermann

Comments are closed.