Popular design decision methods found flawed, impacting future product development.
The article argues that design decision methods need to be validated. It defines what makes a design methodology valid and examines two popular methods, finding flaws in them. The House of Quality and Suh's Axiomatic Design are shown to have limitations under the proposed definition of validity. However, they can still be useful with certain assumptions. The study also looks into the validity of these assumptions and offers a more general definition of validity for decision support methods in design.