from the article : To gain competitive power, product designs and their production means
have become more and more complex over the past decennia. Product designers are
faced with the increasingly difficult task to guarantee steady behavior of the systems
they produce. This requires thorough understanding of the complex principles that
determine the behavior of these products. It starts with notion how the many parts,
of which the product design consists, are cross-linked with each other and their
surroundings. If the design relations act predictable then the product design behaves
predictable, and the functional requirements have high certainty of being satisfied.
Axiomatic Design offers a number of ways to model the relations in a product
design in order to improve its predictability. The ‘information content’ or ‘entropy’
of the design is indicative for the behavior of a system. The information content in
Axiomatic Design is in the jurisdiction of the Information Axiom. This chapter
investigates if information could be applied in a broader context; to bring the whole
of methods in AD under a single heading. According to the definition of information
by Shannon and Weaver, a broader application may be applied for
Axiomatic Design. Along this path, an alternative framework of different kinds of
information is decomposed that can be used to analyze progression in a product
design. ‘Useful information,’ proportional to the ‘ignorance of the designer after
application of all his knowledge,’ is decomposed into three kinds of information
that are applied to graphically monitor the design process as it evolves.