Set-based design

Sažetak | Ovim radom se istražuje scenografski projekat srpskog scenografa Aleksandra Denića za opersku tetralogiju “Prsten Nibelunga” Riharda Vagnera, u režiji kontroverznog nemačkog reditelja postdramskog teatra – Franka Kastorfa, premijerno prikazanu na Festivalu u Bajrojtu 2013. godine, povodom jubileja dvesta godina od kompozitorovog rođenja. Kastorf i Denić su novim postmodernim i postdramskim tumačenjem Vagnerove sage o Nibelunzima, najdubljim delom u istoriji evropske muzike, stvorili jednu od najkompleksnijih inscenacija Prstena, prožetu dekonstrukcijom dramske radnje i realizmom scenske arhitekture uz naglašenu društveno-ideološku metaforu. Dramatikom operskog trilera i scenografskom atmosferom filmskog karaktera reditelj i scenograf eksperimentalno pristupaju Vagnerovom konceptu muzičke drame, tematski objedinivši mitološke priče u jedinstveno putovanje kroz geo-političku istoriju 20. veka zasnovanu na ideološkim i globalističkim uticajima komunizma i neoliberalnog kapitalizma. Dramaturška interpretacija Prstena zasnovana je na ideji da je zlato današnjice crno, odnosno da je to nafta. U vrtlogu suprotstavljenih društvenih vrednosti profit postaje povezujuća spona između istoka i zapada, različitih ideologija i kulturnih obrazaca, koje prevazilaze mitsko kao idealizovanu predstavu nepatvorene nacionalne istorije i kulture. Režijski koncept prenošenja apstraktne teme nordijske mitologije u savremeni istorijski i društveni kontekst, omogućio je scenografu otkrivanje brojnih tema društvene zbilje i njihovo prenošenje u scenski prostor naglašene semantike i vizuelnog doživljaja.
Ključne reći | Festival u Bajrojtu, Rihard Vagner, Prsten Nibelunga, opera, pozorište, Aleksandar Denić, scenografija, semantika scenskog dizajna.


Summary | This paper explores the scenographic project of Serbian set designer Aleksandar Denić for opera tetralogy “The Ring of the Nibelung” by Richard Wagner, directed by the controversial German director of postdramatic theater – Frank Castorf, premiered at the Bayreuth Festival in 2013, for the two hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth. Festival in Bayreuth has become one of the most important opera world events, a place that gathers the most eminent theatre and opera artists around Wagner's music, with the intention of remembrance of Wagner's opera heritage, but also inevitably to find new possibilities for artistic and theatrical interpretation. With the new postmodern and postdramatic interpretation of Wagner's Nibelungen saga, the deepest part of the history of European music, Castorf and Denić had created one of the most complex staging of the Ring, interspersed with the deconstruction of dramatic action and realism of stage architecture with a pronounced socio-ideological metaphor.
Director and set designer have experimentally approached Wagner's concept of music drama, with the drama of the opera thriller and scenographic atmosphere of the film character, they have united the theme of mythological stories in a unique journey through the geo-political history of the 20th century, based on ideological and globalizing influences of communism and neoliberal capitalism. The dramaturgical interpretation of the Ring is based on the idea that gold is black today, and it is oil. In the maelstrom of conflicting social values the profit is the connecting link between East and West, different ideologies and cultural patterns that go beyond the mythical which is an idealized representation of genuine national history and culture. The theme of the drama (opera) action is recognized on a global level, so that oil, as semantically light motive, becomes the connecting link between mythological stories, different ideological constellations and historical premise of the 20th century.
Directorial concept of conveying abstract themes of Norse mythology in contemporary historical and social context enabled the scenographer to detect numerous themes of social reality and its transfer to the scenic area of highlighted semantics and visual experience. Theatrical creative work of Frank Castorf and Aleksandar Denić is based on their maximal engagement of artistic-intuitive and critical-semantic expressions, unified in a unique theatrical approach, which is based on scenographic pulse on which the director based stage space and directing plays. Denić's scenography architecture should be seen as a construct of complex semantic narrative of historical and cultural identification, from which it has made dramaturgical interpretation and deconstruction. At the same time, scenography becomes a visual link that explicitly reveals the dramatic messages, because what in Castorf's direction has done as elusive or incomprehensible, Denić's scenographies showed as a real.
Key words | Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner, The Ring of the Nibelung, opera, theatre, Aleksandar Denić, scenography, semantics of set design.

Increasing system complexity has provided the impetus to develop new and novel systems engineering methodologies. One of these methodologies is set-based design (SBD), a concurrent design methodology well suited for complex systems subject to significant uncertainty. Since the 1990s, numerous private, public, and defense sector design programs have successfully implemented SBD. However, concerns regarding SBD's complexity, tendency toward qualitative methods, and lack of quantitative tools have limited its use. To address these issues, our research surveys 122 refereed journal articles and conference papers to assess SBD's state-of-practice and identify relevant research opportunities. To accomplish these tasks, we perform a structured literature review to identify and assess relevant and influential research. We found that SBD's state-of-practice relies heavily upon decision and tradespace analysis with increasing emphasis on uncertainty modeling and MBSE. We found that the majority of SBD research consists of quantitative methodologies focusing on component and small system applications. We also found that complex system applications used mostly qualitative methodologies. We identify SBD research opportunities for requirements development, MBSE, uncertainty modeling, multiresolution modeling, adversarial analysis, and program management. Finally, we recommend the development of a comprehensive SBD methodology and toolkit, suited for complex system design across all stages of the product development life cycle.

This article presents a transformation process towards lean product development in an aerospace industr y. This transformation was achieved in two main stages: the first was to integrate the principles of set-based concurrent engineering into an existing product development model of an aerospace company. This stage included defining activities and associated tools. The second stage was to implement the developed model in a research-based industrial case study, a helicopter engine in this case . Three main outcomes were realised from this work. First, it presented an industrial case of lean transformation in product development, where the leanness of an existing model was enhanced by embedding set-based concurrent engineering principles. Second, the developed model was structured into a set of well-defined activities and associated tools that were previously scattered or redundant. Finally, the developed model was trialled in an industrial project of a helicopter engine, tested to evaluate its value in enhancing the innovation level and reducing risk. The work presented in this article focused on early stage system level design, and future work will extend the implementation of set-based concurrent engineering to sub-system and component levels.

Peeping Back on the Peeping Tom: Voyeurism through Hitchcock's Set Design Toward the end of WWII in 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill opined, "America at this moment stands at the summit of the world." 1 Churchill's comment was certainly evident in the 1950s as the United States became the world's strongest military power, developed a booming economy, and created a prosperous suburban and consumer nation extending beyond the city limits. However, the seemingly utopian society began to disclose its underlying dystopian divisions throughout the 1950s and continuing into the 1960s with the Civil Rights movement regarding gender relations. A woman not only earned a lower salary in the workplace, but was also viewed as a domesticated object, an inferior to the man. Social mobility, or lack thereof for women at the time allowed for the exploitation of the work of others and the scrutiny of their activity, making gender something to not only spy on, but also a means of spying. 2 The dichotomy between the roles of men and women and the concept of the "gaze" upon others fostered an age of anxiety that was captured in cinema through the genre of suspense and horror, particularly in the set design of films by director Alfred Hitchcock. 3 Anxiety, from suspense,

The need of applying lean thinking to product development is becoming a must for the organisations to succeed in the
current industry. This paper presents the development and application of a tool that helps to identify the actual status of
the organisation in relation to the lean principles. Overview of the literature highlighted the need of developing a tool
focused on assessing the implementation of lean principles themselves, rather than quantitative metrics. Based on the idea
of the balanced scorecard, four perspectives, with their corresponding set of questions, were defined reflecting the
enablers of the lean product development model proposed by the Lean Product and Process Development European
project. A five-level scale was customised to reflect different readiness levels of lean implementation. The tool was used
in case studies in two organisations; first in aerospace and second in automotive. Examples of measurement from two
different organisations demonstrated the accuracy of the tool in assessing and defining the starting conditions for adapting
lean principles and practices.

Some years ago, I discovered that, besides the well-known representations of different variants of the VajradhatumaJ.l<;lala throughout early Tibetan monuments, and in particular in the monuments of the western Himalayas, there are also a number of Central Tibetan scroll paintings or thang ka closely related to the Vajradhatumal).<;lala. These paintings are part of a series of at least five, where each is dedicated either to the centre or a quarter of the mandala. As the main deities on these paintings are the five Tathagatas or Jinas of the five Buddha families, the relevant thang ka have generally not been identified precisely and differentiated from other depictions of the five Jinas. 2 As I have briefly noted in the case of the first example of such a painting that I discovered and published in a review article (Luczanits 2001: 137-38), when seeing a thang ka dedicated to one of the Jinas, one has to differentiate between those paintings that depict the five Tathagatas with the secondary Bodhisattvas displayed symmetrically and with only the standing Bodhisattvas individualized, and those where all secondary Bodhisattvas clearly convey an iconographic meaning by being individualized. While thang ka of the former type may be described as 'Five Jina Thang ka', those of the second type have to be identified by the more general subject depicted.

The need of applying lean thinking to product development is becoming a must for the organisations to success in the current industry. This paper presents a tool that helps to define the actual status of the organisations in relation to the lean principles. Extensive literature highlighted the need of developing a tool focused on assessing the implementation of lean principles themselves, rather than quantitate metrics. Based on the Balanced Scorecard, four perspectives, with corresponding set of questions, were defined reflecting the enablers of the product development model proposed by the LeanPPD European project. A five-level scale was customised to score the different readiness levels that define the transformation into a full lean implementation. The tool was used to assess the current and desired lean situation of an aerospace company within the research environment and resulted to be accurate to define the starting condition of the company to adopt leaner practices.

— This paper presents a modeling and control method for the thermohygrometric condition (temperature and humidity) in a multizone building. The interconnection between the zones is captured through an undirected graph. Employing an electrical circuit analogy, rooms represent capacitances, and walls and doors/windows are resistances. This model characterizes both mass and heat transfer between the zones and their coupling within each zone, extending the temperature-only resistance– capacitance models commonly used in the building control literature. By using physics-based computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, we verify that this lumped-parameter model is a reasonable approximation of the physical system. The control objective is to drive the temperature and humidity of each zone into the comfort region in the psychrometric chart, using the mass-flow rate of the supplied air into the zone as the control input. In contrast to thermal-only building control, the challenge of this problem is to use a single control variable, mass-flow rate, to regulate both temperature and humidity. Our approach is to first design a feedforward control based on the desired steady-state condition within the comfort zone. We then draw on our previous work on passivity-based building temperature control to show that the thermohygrometric model around the steady state is strictly passive, from the mass-flow rate to a synthetic output combining temperature and humidity. This allows the use of any passive feedback controller combined with the feedforward to achieve robust stabilization about the desired operating point. The feedforward may be further adaptively updated, resulting in an integral-control term in the controller. Finally, to reduce the energy usage, we only apply the controller outside of the comfort zone and turn OFF the controller within the comfort zone. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, simulation results using both the lumped and CFD models are presented for an existing physical six-room testbed.

This dissertation comprises a body of research facilitating decision-making and complex system development with quantitative set-based design (SBD). SBD is concurrent product development methodology, which develops and analyzes many design alternatives for longer time periods enabling design maturation and uncertainty reduction. SBD improves design space exploration, facilitating the identification of resilient and affordable systems. The literature contains numerous qualitative descriptions and quantitative methodologies describing limited aspects of the SBD process. However, there exist no methodologies enabling the quantitative management of SBD programs throughout the entire product development cycle. This research addresses this knowledge gap by developing the process framework and supporting methodologies guiding product development from initial system concepts to a final design solution. This research provides several new research contributions. First, we provide a comprehensive SBD state-of-practice assessment identifying key knowledge and methodology gaps. Second, we demonstrate the physical implementation of the integrated analytics framework in a model-based engineering environment. Third, we develop a quantitative methodology enabling program management decision making in SBD. Fourth, we describe a supporting uncertainty reduction methodology using multiobjective value of information analysis to assess design set maturity and higher-resolution model usefulness. Finally, we describe a quantitative SBD process framework enabling sequential design maturation and uncertainty reduction decisions. Using an unmanned aerial vehicle case study, we demonstrate our methodology’s ability to resolve uncertainty and converge a complex design space onto a set of resilient and affordable design solutions.

System design is an exercise in sequential decisionmaking, with the objective of developing resilient and affordable systems. Throughout the design process, engineering and program managers must balance several competing objectives, such as ensuring design feasibility, minimizing cost, schedule, and performance risk, while simultaneously achieving stakeholder value. Thus, engineering and program managers require design and analysis methods enabling complex and multiobjective design decisions under uncertainty. Unfortunately, there exists limited research providing quantitative methodologies specifically enabling program management decisions using quantitative set-based design. We, therefore, present a quantitative set maturation and uncertainty resolution decision methodology using value-focused multiobjective decision models and model-based engineering practices. This methodology assesses and quantifies uncertainty regarding stakeholder value, cost, requirements, and design maturity for each design set. These metrics facilitate the calculation of the program manager value, which when combined with design set feasibility entropy, enable tradeoff analysis informing design maturation and uncertainty resolution prioritization decisions. We develop and demonstrate our methodology using a model-based unmanned aerial vehicle case study implemented in the ModelCenter modeling environment. This methodology provides program managers an efficient, cost effective, and defensible approach to inform system design maturation and uncertainty resolution decisions enabling the development of resilient and affordable systems.

System designers, analysts, and engineers use various techniques to develop complex systems. A traditional design approach, point-based design (PBD), uses system decomposition and modeling, simulation, optimization, and analysis to find and compare discrete design alternatives. Set-based design (SBD) is a concurrent engineering technique that compares a large number of design alternatives grouped into sets. The existing SBD literature discusses the qualitative team based characteristics of SBD, but lacks insights into how to quantitatively perform SBD in a team environment. This paper proposes a qualitative SBD conceptual framework for system design, proposes a team-based, quantitative SBD approach for early system design and analysis, and uses an unmanned aerial vehicle case study with an integrated model-based engineering framework to demonstrate the potential benefits of SBD.We found that quantitative SBD tradespace exploration can identify potential designs, assess design feasibility, inform system requirement analysis, and evaluate feasible designs. Additionally, SBD helps designers and analysts assess design decisions by providing an understanding of how each design decision affects the feasible design space. We conclude that SBD provides a more holistic tradespace exploration process since it provides an integrated examination of system requirements and design decisions.

Euler diagrams represent sets and graphs are often used to represent networked data (i.e. items and their relationships). They can be used in combination and have the potential to be a powerful technique for visualizing and analyzing large and complex data sets. For example, in figure 1 the Euler diagram on the left visualizes the sets of users of the social networks twitter, google+, orkut and facebook. The graph in the middle uses edges to depict connection relationships e.g. twitter followers, facebook friends and so on. Lastly, the diagram on the right combines the two visualizations, which in combination gives immediacy of information extraction.
Existing attempts to automatically layout graphs and Euler diagrams in combination to visualize grouped networked data for data analysts have produced somewhat limited results [1]. It is this problem that we will address. We aim to develop Euler diagrams and graphs in combination which includes devising new theory alongside practical software. Our approach will be to determine whether the state-of-the-art drawing methods for Euler diagrams and for graphs can be merged and extended. This will include the development of novel drawing algorithms and layout tools.

The Configuration Optimisation of Next-Generation Aircraft (CONGA) is a proposed framework in a response to industrial need to enhance the aerospace capability in the UK. In order to successfully address this challenge, a need to develop a true multi-disciplinary Set-Based Design (SBD) capability that could deploy new technologies on novel configurations more quickly and with greater confidence was identified. This paper presents the first step towards the development of the SBD capabilities which is to elicit the industrial requirement of the SBD process for the key aerospace industrial partners involved in this CONGA approach.

Increasing system complexity requires that engineers, systems analysts, and program managers use comprehensive design methodologies to deliver affordable and resilient designs. One method is set-based design (SBD), a product development and managerial process distinctly suited for developing complex systems under uncertainty. SBD simultaneously develops, analyzes, and matures numerous potential design sets, enabling the identification of high-value, affordable, and resilient designs. Published SBD research is a rich source of both qualitative and quantitative methods. This research specifically focuses on quantitative SBD methods to apply a value of information (VOI) methodology enabling design convergence and selection. We build upon previous SBD research to enable design maturation and uncertainty reduction. Our methodology integrates design maturation and multiobjective VOI analysis into a comprehensive quantitative SBD process to guide system development from initial design concepts to the pre-production design decision. In doing so, we also provide refinements and process improvements to existing quantitative SBD methods. We demonstrate our methodology with a model-based UAV design case study using an integrated suite of system, value, and cost models. Our case study specifically focuses on the design maturation and model selection decisions enabling design space convergence. We compare our current results with those from a previous UAV case study, achieving a 41% reduction in required computation time for design space convergence. These results highlight the methodology's ability to reduce program risk and potential to improve SBD convergence efficiency.

Engineering complex systems is an exercise in sequential multiobjective decision making under uncertainty. One method for handling this complexity and uncertainty is set-based design (SBD). SBD is a concurrent engineering and management methodology that develops, analyzes, and matures numerous design options, reducing risk and delivering higher value to the stakeholders and end users. SBD accomplishes this through controlled design space convergence which reduces uncertainty and prevents premature design decisions. While SBD has been the subject of numerous scholarly articles, there is limited research providing quantitative methodologies that inform decisions enabling design maturation and convergence. We present a value of information (VOI) based methodology for multiobjective decision problems, and demonstrate its applicability for SBD decisions. We apply Bayesian decision models and information value to inform multiobjective modeling and design maturation decisions. Research contributions include: 1) a framework integrating VOI into the SBD process, 2) a multiobjective VOI method assessing a higher-resolution model's ability to reduce uncertainty, and 3) a means of informing modeling decisions by comparing multiple high resolutions models, given their usage cost and their potential to deliver information value. Finally, we demonstrate the inherent issues associated with premature decisions and traditional point-based design approaches which run the risk of selecting an alternative that later proves infeasible.

This essay is the second in a three-part series about ideology and space on AMC's lauded television show "Mad Men." See the attached link to "Flow"'s website, where the article was published, for embedded videos intended to be viewed alongside reading the essay.