Editor | On 30, Aug 2009

Ellen Domb

ICED – the International Conference on Engineering Design – is the flagship event of the Design Society. The Seventeenth Conference was held last week at Stanford University in the USA. Over 200 papers were presented by a wide range of participants. Cause for celebration for Real Innovation and TRIZ Journal readers: Two of the 5 papers on TRIZ (written by friends of the TJ!) were honored as 2 of the 4 best papers at the conference, and 2 of the 37 “Reviewers’ Favorites.” 

The full program, with abstracts, is available now at
http://stanford.edu/~merkuron/icedprogram/ICED%2709%20Program%20Web%20View.pdf so readers can see the august company that the winners were in, and how significant these awards are. It was eye-opening for me to see the academic side of the study of the design process.

The papers honored were:

• “A Dialectical Approach to Solve Inventive Problems Using Genetic Algorithms and TRIZ: Searching for a Computer Aided Innovation Shell” by Roberto Alejandro Duran-Novoa, Noel Leon-Rovira, and Eduardo Uresti from Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, México (presented by Roberto at the conference)
  
• “Functional Modeling for TRIZ-Based Evolutionary Analyses” by Gaetano Cascini from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, Federico Rotini from Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy, and Davide Russo from  Università degli Studi di Bergamo, Italy (presented by Gaetano at the conference)

Our congratulations to the winners on being honored by their colleagues. It is very interesting that there was a special session of the conference on the relationship between design prizes and design methodologies and popular acceptance of design innovations. I wonder whether the award of prizes to papers will have a similar effect on TRIZ as a popular method in future design conferences? Please use the comment feature of this column if you have any thoughts on this.