The Structures of Solution Principles and Their Role in the Betterment of Designs

This project is based on the observation that the structure of an idea, whether that idea takes the form of a scientific discovery or an engineering innovation, influences its long-term impact. The objective of this project is to investigate the structure of the solution principles for the design of a product and their effect on the product’s potential for improvement.

To achieve this objective, the project will perform a long-term and in-depth study of one of world’s most important products: the sewing machine. Discoveries about product improvement over time based upon the properties of solution principles for sewing machines are likely to be generalizable, because the longitudinal data collected in the project will cover major design and technological improvements that took place across more than 150-years of social, economic, and political changes.

Understanding the reasons that solution principles affect a product’s potential for improvement will enable design engineers to accelerate opportunities for improvement more effectively, implement changes with more confidence, and iterate faster. This is a matter of economic importance, because the US government and the private sector invest billions of dollars annually into new products that employ advanced technologies.

This project connects the engineering details of a design to product improvement to enable informed resource allocation in engineering innovation. Broader impacts of the research include a collaboration with the National Museum of American History to share the research results through online and physical exhibits of sewing machines, which will enhance public scientific and technological understanding.

This collaboration will also enhance research infrastructure by making publicly available the set of physical and functional models that will be produced during this project.

The goal of this project is to investigate the endogenous improvement potential of a product due to the structure of solution principles in its design. The project conceptualizes the problem of understanding the long-term improvement of products as a problem of design complexity. The project will collect patent data and collaborate with the National Museum of American History to document the solution principles of multiple generations of sewing machines.

Using this dataset, the project will compute the degree of design transformation using new graph-based metrics, each of which takes a different perspective on the concept of transformation. The project contributes important conceptual and methodological advances. First, the project improves strategic design advice in directing design search by explaining whether constraints on improvement imposed by the solution principles are independent or hierarchical.

The simultaneous analysis of physical and functional architectures to understand their influence on product improvement will produce a clear causal logic between the design and its improvement potential. The logic will underpin the establishment of new design strategies to increase a product’s potential for future improvement. Understanding how the structures of solution principles and the solution principles themselves positively affect or impede the potential for betterment will enable design engineers to select and architect solution principles to facilitate improvements to a product in subsequent generations.

The collaboration with the National Museum of American History will broaden dissemination to enhance scientific and technological understanding by contributing to physical and online exhibitions in the museum’s collection of American textile machines. The set of physical and functional models produced during the performance of this research will cover the history of the development of the sewing machine in the United States.

The data will be publicly available and become a valuable source for scholars studying innovation, thereby enhancing infrastructure for research. Even though this study focuses on an engineered product, the research insights will apply to all kinds of systems for which the potential for change is governed by the system’s underlying structure.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.