Promoting Risk Communication in Early Design through Linguistic Analyses

Abstract

The concept of function offers significant potential for transforming thinking and reasoning about engineering design as well as providing a common thread for relating together product risk information. This paper focuses specifically on risk data by examining how this information is addressed for a design team conducting early stage design for space missions. A fundamental set of risk elements is proposed based on a linguistic analysis of the risk information needs of the design team. Sample risk statements are then decomposed into a set of key attributes that are used to scrutinize the risk information using three approaches from the pragmatics sub-field of linguistics: (1) Gricean, (2) Relevance Theory, and (3) Functional Analysis. Based on the deficiencies identified in this analysis, a format for the communication of risk data by explicitly accounting for five risk attributes developed in this work is formulated.

Department(s)

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering

Keywords and Phrases

Product Design; Risk Analysis; Linguistics

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0934-9839

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2009 Springer Verlag, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Mar 2009

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