VISUALISING EARLY PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT INFORMATION Filippo A. Salustri and Jayesh Parmar Abstract The authors believe that an appropriate diagramming tool can be of substantial benefit to design- ers, especially in the early, pre-geometry stages of product development. We find no such tool to exist. We therefore introduce design schematics (DS) as such a tool. We outline the general benefits of diagramming and then consider the advantages and disadvantages of some existing diagramming methods. Our analysis of this motivates the development of DS. Several examples demonstrate how DSs can capture important information during early design stages. We are currently developing a computational tool that implements DS and discuss some of the issues we face in this regard. While there is not yet any quantitative data by which DS can be evaluated, there is anecdotal evidence suggesting that the tool has potential to be of benefit to practising designers. Keywords: visualisation, product model, concept map, non-geometric information 1 Introduction The early stages of product development are the most crucial. The Pareto Principle tells us that 80% of the performance of a product with respect to cost, quality, function, usability and ergo- nomics, environmental friendliness, etc. is set by the decisions taken in the first 20% of the prod- uct’s development process. Products are also becoming more complex in response to user so- phistication, new technologies, and government regulations. This places a further burden on the product developer. Globalisation further complicates matters by broadening the potential marketplace, the field of competitors for that market, and the organisational, geographical, and cultural characteristics of the product development teams themselves. Design information must be made relevant to all aspects of the product development process for concurrent engineering and related practices to yield their full benefits. Teams must share information with colleagues, suppliers, and managers who may be physically distant, so it is essential that design information be presented in a clear, concise way. There are cultural issues too: in the “global village”, design information written in one natural language can be misinterpreted by recipients not very familiar with it. Lessening the dependence on natural language will aid in the internationalisation of design information and thus benefit culturally diverse design teams. One way of dealing with both the importance of early product development and its increased complexity is to find strategies to simplify the methods and tools used by product development teams. However, it is exactly in the crucial early stages of product development (before product geometry has been established) that the least amount of work has been done to find clean, effi- cient methods to represent and reason about products and product models. In the end, what en-