Date of Award
8-2026
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Committee Chair/Advisor
Cameron J. Turner
Committee Member
Gregory Mocko
Committee Member
Mary E. Kurz
Committee Member
Chris Mabey
Committee Member
Joshua D. Summers
Abstract
Tradespace exploration (TSE) is a decision-making process used in engineering design to search through a tradespace, containing all potential solutions to a design problem and their performance evaluations, in order to select optimal or near-optimal solutions. Solution optimality is driven by a desire to maximize the overall utility of a solution, which often cannot be done without making tradeoffs or compromises. The TSE process requires vast amounts of information which can be difficult to generate and understand, often leading to challenges including information overload, delays in decision-making, and suboptimal decisions, even for the most experienced designers. To address the challenges caused by this highly-dimensional information, this work assesses the impacts of two methods to control the information presented to a designer: the focus and representation of tradespace information and the relative framing of designer goals. Tradespace information is represented in a tabular approach focused on design variables or in a graphical approach focused on evaluations of performance objectives. The design problem itself is framed such that the group of designers are working either collaboratively towards shared goals, adversarially towards different goals, or siloed, with different goals and unshared information between them. Each method was applied to a simulated vehicle design problem, where the design of a vehicle was specified by ten design variables and its performance evaluated along ten performance objectives. Teams of 3-4 mechanical engineering students generated designs, evaluated their performance, and compared generated options to select a single design with preferable performance. Analysis was conducted on the design behaviors used by the team, encoded using a novel TSE activities framework, as well as on the relative performance of team-selected design outcomes. This analysis revealed that performance-focused approaches resulted in fewer overall TSE activities, implying faster and more efficient decision-making behavior. Design-focused approaches led to higher occurrence of TSE activities, particularly those relevant to ideation and analysis, indicating encouragement of exploration aspects of the TSE process but not decision-making behavior. The effects of either approach were apparent to participants, who preferred the design experience using the graphical performance-focused approach. Comparison of the three framing methods revealed that adversarial framing was the least efficient method with the highest overall activity count, followed by collaborative framing and then siloed framing. Collaborative framing was less efficient than expected, with a high prevalence of activities dedicated to increasing understanding and simplifying the overall design problem. Problem simplification was provided by the siloed framing; this led participants to prefer designing in that scenario. Preferences for information presentation that minimize the amount of information that designers are responsible for at any one time or that use graphics to simplify information intelligibility lend credence to the challenge of understanding all of the information that forms a TSE problem. The key contributions of this work are the identification of methods that address the information overload challenge and the TSE activities framework that can be used to analyze their impact.
Recommended Citation
Sutton, Meredith G., "Investigating the Impacts of Information Framing and Representation on Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making for Tradespace Exploration" (2026). All Dissertations. 4330.
https://open.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/4330
Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4189-6555