Towards an ‘ideal’ approach for concept generation
Abstract Conceptual design should contain two kinds of steps: divergent in which alternative concepts are generated, and convergent in which these are evaluated and selected. The aim of conceptual design is to develop promising concepts. This requires generating a wide range of concepts (to prevent overlooking valuable concepts), and evaluating/selecting these soon enough (to restrict their number from getting too large to allow meaningful consideration). Existing concept generation approaches are suggested to be used only after concept sketches are available. This raises a question—what should the ‘ideal’ approach be before concept sketches are developed? This paper proposes such an approach.
The following casestudy provides a workflow perspective on the Grid ENabled Integrated Earth system modelling (GENIE) framework, which was introduced in Vol. 2.