Design methods all aim to lead a designer to one or more good solutions to a design
problem. The design method’s developer expresses his or her own beliefs about the
best tactics for identifying good designs in the method’s principles or major strategies.
Axiomatic Design was developed by Nam P. Suh, a mechanical engineering professor
at MIT. Suh’s intention was to identify a set of fundamental laws or principles for
engineering design and use them as the basis for a rigorous theory of design. A design
theory would make it possible to answer such questions as: Is this a good design? Why
is this design better than others? How many features of the design must satisfy the
needs expressed by the customers? When is a candidate design complete? What can
be done to improve a particular design? When is it appropriate to abandon a design
idea or modify the concept?
Professor Nam Suh and his colleagues at MIT have developed a basis for design
that is focused around two design axioms. This section will introduce Suh’s axioms
and how they are used to structure design creation and the improvement of existing
designs.