Pragmatic Concurrent Engineering: Emotion, Experience and Engineering

Our products have been developed on a feed forward linear model. This could roughly be described as a differential approach. We looked at local region and optimized. The early concurrent engineering emphasized to bring downstream information as much upstream as possible. But this is not the optimization of the whole product lifecycle. It is the optimization of production. Increasing diversification, complexity and globalization call for a much broader perspective. Optimization throughout a whole product life cycle including product use is now called for. In order to achieve such a goal, feedbacks from user experience must be considered and the system must be adaptive to changing situations. Today, our path may be continuous, but the changes are sharp. i.e., changes yesterday were differentiable but they are not differentiable today. Our world was closed in the 20th century but now it is an expanding open world. We have to get prepared for the unexpected in order to explore such a New World. We have to look more globally. This calls for an integral approach. Emotion and experience play important roles in such an approach which complement the factors in our traditional differential approach.