R H Bracewell MA (Cantab.), PhD

Photo of Rob Bracewell

Rob Bracewell is an Assistant Director of the Engineering Design Centre, Cambridge University. He has researched in the fields of ocean wave-energy conversion, mechatronics, and for the last 16 years in the study of engineering design, firstly as a founder member of the Lancaster EDC, and then at Cambridge. His design research has centred on the creation of innovative software tools to aid designers. The Schemebuilder toolset supported the generation and evaluation of innovative design solutions, by reasoning about function, and employing integrated simulation of the generated schemes. In recent years he has researched, implemented and introduced into industry the Design Rationale Editor (DRed). This unobtrusively captures, graphically presents, and stores for future reuse, the rationale behind the day to day decisions of individuals or groups of designers.

Book Chapter

  • Bracewell, R.H., Synthesis based on function - means trees: Schemebuilder, in Engineering Computational Design: Understanding, Approaches and Tools, Springer, 199-212, 2002.

Publications

  • Bracewell, R.H., Ahmed, S. and Wallace, K.M., DRed and design folders: a way of capturing, storing and passing on - knowledge generated during design projects in Design Automation Conference, ASME Design Engineering Technical Conferences, Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, 2004.
  • Bracewell, R.H. and Wallace, K.M., A tool for capturing design rationale in ICED03, 14th International Conference on Engineering Design, Stockholm, Sweden, 185-186, 2003.
  • Aurisicchio, M., Bracewell, R.H. and Wallace, K.M., A design data model to support rationale capture and functional synthesis in ASME 2003 Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA, DETC2003/DTM-48672, 2003.
  • Bracewell, R.H., Shea, K., Langdon, P.M., Blessing, L.T.M. and Clarkson, P.J., A methodology for computational design tool research in 13th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 01), Glasgow, Scotland, UK, Vol: Design Research - Theories, Methodologies, and Product Modelling, 181-188, 2001.