Design For X

Under the label Design for X, a wide collection of specific design guidelines are summarized. Each design guideline addresses a particular issue that is caused by, or affects the characteristics of a product. The design guidelines themselves usually propose an approach and corresponding methods that may help to generate and apply technical knowledge in order to control, improve, or even to invent particular characteristics of a product. From a knowledge-based view, the design guideline represents an explicit form of knowledge, that contains information about "knowing-how-to" (see Procedural knowledge). However, two problems are prevalent. First, this explicit knowledge (i.e. the design guidelines) were transformed from a tacit form of knowledge (i.e. by experienced engineers, or other specialists). Thus, it is not granted that a freshman or someone who is outside of the subject area will comprehend this generated explicit knowledge. This is because it still contains embedded fractions of knowledge or respectively include non-obvious assumptions, also called context-dependency (see e.g. Doz and Santos, 1997:16-18). Second, the characteristics of a product are likely to exceed the knowledge base of a single human. There exists a wide range of specialized fields of engineering, and considering the whole life cycle of a product will require non-engineering expertise. For this purpose examples of design guidelines are listed in the following.

DFX means design for excellence, and also "design for X", where X is a variable with many values.