Function Ordering Within Morphological Charts: An Experimental Study

Morphological charts are widely recognized tools in engineering design applications and research. However, a literature gap exists in instructing the representation and exploration of morphological charts. In this paper, an experiment is conducted to understand how morphological charts are explored and what impact functional arrangement has on it. The experiment consisted of two problem statements, each with five different functional arrangements: 1) Most to Least Important Function, 2) Least to Most Important Function, 3) Input to Output Function, 4) Output to Input Function, and 5) Random. Sixty-seven junior mechanical engineering students were provided a prepopulated morphological chart and asked to generate integrated design concepts. The generated concepts were analyzed to determine how frequently a given means is selected, how much of the chart is explored, what is the sequence of exploration, and finally the influence of function ordering on them. Experimental results indicate a tendency to focus more on the initial columns of the chart irrespective of functional order. Moreover, the Most-to-Least-Important functional order results in higher chances and uniformity of design space exploration.