Because everyone believes that without these methods, you can still design well. There is no comparison between design following a design method and not following. (How can we vigorously compare?)

Quite often it is the question of time. Production cycles becomes shorter as a result engineers often rely on their previous design experience rather than on new for them and uncertain with the results methods.

I think there are two reasons for that: 

1- we teach systematic design methods in academia but in the same time we encourage using other methods as brainstorming and sketching to stimulate team work and innovation. 

2- the industrial work style, work to develop a product which is existing or create a new one. in the first case, to save time designers tend to do what marketers want from them. e.g. marketing department think that users need to add a feature, so designers add it without need to analyse the product. In the second case, designers want to be innovative and systematic methods in this case will push him into details that will reduce his innovation. 

It takes too long and is too complex. Time and budget constraints of design practice do not allow for that. Some methods in de field of user-centered design failed in practice because they simply took to long to execute or were to hard to learn.

In some sense systematic design methods seem to fit more with educational purposes than with the requirements of design practice. It forces you to explore all options, think analytically, etc. Which is all very good to do in practice as well, but there you lack the time.

Also I see some dislike among designers for (overly) systematic design methods.

In my opinion, some of these design methods have been used by large companies which account for the necessity of R&D for product development. I agree about the reasons: hard to learn, complexity, time etc..As a solution to promote the use of the methods, we should teach any engineering  design lectures by integrating or infusing design methods to the lectures, so the education can be a key way here. 

It's all a matter of budget. Regular industry normally goes for "known" processes that can be trusted in order to optimize its production and make the final product profitable.

I agree that time, complexity and learning difficulties can be discouraging characteristics. We obtain the same feedbacks from our students when we ask them to comment the systematic approach. However they also admit that, once the method has been learned, it is possible to actually observe some of the advantages claimed by literature.

Past experieces convinced me that designing systematically (in general) is foundamental for achieving good results. But it is very difficult to make people understand it.

Does it depends on a lack of emphasis in diffusing the approach out of the academia? Maybe the benefit/cost ratio is not sufficiently high? Can the problem be resolved by improving the method (e.g. improving the generation of innovative solution, lowering the laboriousness, etc..)?

I know that the answer to these questions is not trivial, but besides the information that can be obtained from articles, I would like to know peers opinion in a more informal way.

You might also want to look at the work of Jaap Daalhuizen, who studied the (conditions for) the adoption of design methods by designer in practice. http://www.dtu.dk/english/Service/Phonebook/Person?id=58692&tab=2&qt=dtupublicationquery

See my paper under my name in ResearchGate:

Eder, W.E., ‘Design Modeling – a Design Science Approach (and Why Does Industry Not Use It?)’, Journal of Engineering Design, Vol 9, No 4, 1998, pp 355-371

Extensive discussions about using systematic design methods with other (pragmatic, industry-best-practice, etc.) methods are included in:

Eder, W.E. and Hosnedl, S., Design Engineering: A Manual for Enhanced Creativity, Boca Raton: CRC-Press, 2007

Eder, W.E. and Hosnedl, S., Introduction to Design Engineering: Systematic Creativity and Management, Leiden, NL: CRC Press/Balkema, 2010

Most design problems in industry tend to be (relatively) routine, requiring little formal analysis, and engineering designers can use their prior experience to rapidly find acceptable solutions at low mental energy. Those few really novel design problems that are not routine can best be solved by systematic methods, at increased mental energy and time expense, if (and only if) the designer is familiar with these methods before attempting a critical problem -- learning methods "on the job" usually leads to failure. That is the reason for students learning in academic situations, from where they can also gain understanding rather than just experience .

Thanks for the suggested and very precious references.

Amongst the numerous possible reasons that hinder the acceptance of method by industry, it seems to me that the differentiation between routine and non-routine design tasks could be the root for many of the criticisms. Indeed, impressions about required time and outcomes are often conflicting...and a reason can be the actual needs of the asked person in terms of design task normally faced.

But, in one hand it is true that industry often deals with routine design tasks (then ignoring the recalled methods) but, in the other hand, very often it happens that  the design and/or managin team  decides (incounsiously or not) if the task can be a routine one or not.  Adapting structural parts for new requirements, using known working principles for implementing required functions, are certainly routine tasks, but (to me) it is often possible (when time restrictions are not too tight) to discuss about the assigned design task. For example, it is really useful to only adapt the existing structure, or it could be better to investigate about new working principles? - what about the functions? etc. These questions can lead to transform an ordinary design task into a non-ordinary one (as perceived by the designer), where the (correct) use of systematic models for conceptual design can be justified.

Then, the improvement of the task clarification phase in that sense can be one of the possible keys for promoting the diffusion of systematic approaches for conceptual design?

Many good points from Lorenzo. In addition, most organizations only start work on a project (design task) when the deadline approaches, which leaves too little time to really investigate any possible innovations. Management needs to ensure that these projects are started early, to allow thinking to take place. And innovations do not need design methodologies -- they can help, but are not prerequisites. Industry is so busy that they do not find time to search for better methods. Even academia is not too interested in other peoples' thoughts -- we academics must produce novel contributions, not extensions of previous ideas.

I could go on like this, bot it begins to sound like sour grapes.

In 1999, we completed a survey with the involvement of many industrial managers and designers to learn their opinion about the relationship of the industry to formal conceptual design methods and tools developed and proposed by the academia. First of all we learnt that, then, product conceptualization and conceptual design were simply reduced to, but supported seemingly successfully, by creative group meetings, reactivation of experiences, and reusing the analogies from existing products. As it has been reported in the attached paper, a typical engineering company rarely used computer-aided conceptual design methods and tools from the academia on a daily basis. The industry treated conceptual design as a stepchild and discarded using conceptual design tools developed by the academia. The survey managed to identify three reasons for this. First, almost all of the then offered conceptual design tools were based on abstract reasoning models or representations. However, instead, the industry preferred concrete models and representations, since their ultimate goal was manufacturing and assembly. Furthermore, product designers had different opinion about abstract representations than scientists, consequently they had many difficulties in interpreting them unambiguously. The proliferation of CACD tools was also hindered by the fact that they were tailored to specific products or to specific aspects of conceptualization. Second, the output of the then available conceptual design tools could not be directly used as input of the commercialized CAD/E systems. Semantic conversion of incomplete, under-defined or imprecise product data was too challenging and/or tedious according to the interviewees. Designers were not keen on accepting the overhead that came from manual conversions and/or remodelling. Third, the offered conceptual design techniques were typically sophisticated, but synthetic solutions, which were not in harmony with the natural thinking and working of the designers during product conceptualization. Seemingly this situation is still prevailing ...

Because the industry requires real answer's and methods that work and academics don't. They need methods that are publishable and reference  to other  useless published methods.

Try publishing a paper on useful methods and see the reaction from academics.

Dear Sivam -- I am an academic, with 10 years of design-office experience in industry prior to becoming an academic. Your criticism has a point, but it is not nearly as general as you would have us believe. Many published design methods originated in industry (known as "industry best practice" methods), but generally do not cover the whole (possible) engineering design process. Most of these methods are declared "useful" because these particular users are familiar with that method -- unfamiliarity is cause for a method to be declared "unusable" by one person, and this declaration is then expanded by others to say that the method is "generally unusable".

As I mentioned before, trying to learn a method under the pressure of also trying to find a useful result from that method is a recipe for failure, leading to the method being declared "useless". The references in my ResearchGate profile (and my first answer) are an attempt (initiated around 1965 by Vladimir Hubka) to underpin a proposed (set of) methods with a generalized description (a theory) of technical systems (engineering products) -- which makes the proposed (set of) methods as complete and systematic as possible. Completeness and usability has been verified by (up to now) 23 case examples from four authors -- published in reviewed conference proceedings, academic journals, and books. This theory and systematic (but voluntarily usable) method has been successfully introduced into some industrial organizations (by Prof. S. Hosnedl, Pilsen, Czech Republic), and has improved their understanding and scope of their engineering design processes. We have also demonstrated that many of the "industry best practice" methods are usable to enhance different parts of the proposed systematic engineering design method. The biggest problem is to try to expose as many people as possible to that wok -- and both academics and ordinary people are notorious for not listening, and hiding behind their own experience

Interesting - if I am not mistaken, only scholars from academic institutions have reacted on this interesting question so far .... I would be pleased to learn the opinion of industry representatives and to compare the above arguments with theirs.

Yes, I agree with Mr. Tomyama. Industry is constantly looking for things that work and make maximum use of its resources. She does not care if it does not fit in the method x, y or z. Interestingly, I think the industry uses systematic methods in their projects as an amalgamation of several topics covered in the academies. Business owners and executives do not hold meetings to discuss theories but paths to success.

Yes, Filippo, I agree with you. The paths to success would be less zigzagging and risky... Just consider how many products do fail every year (see many of them on Google by "failed products 20xx".)

Just reading these few opinions, it is possible to have a representation of the (let's say) chaos when talking about design methods: someone who is totally sceptic, someone that promote, someone else that have a neutral position.

Positive characteristics for teaching purposes seems to be acknowledged by almost everyone. Diversely, for what concerning  industrial acceptance, different opinions can be found. To me, too many parameters could influence the personal belief about a specific method (personal experiences, knowledge background, familiarity with the specific method, etc.), and then it is not possible to judge here, but it would be very interesting to have more information. For example, Prof. Krish says that academic methods are useless, and that useful methods are hard to be accepted by academics. But how do you define a method as useful or useless?

Often, application and learning difficulties/time are considered as the most impacting negative characterstics for industry acceptance. But, what about the level of expertise (in the specific method) of industrial practitioners who provided such information? What about the type of the design tasks? What about the time restrictions?

Because I really believe that the negative characteristics claimed here (and the others reported by literature) are well founded. However, I suppose that one size doesn't fit all...and any case should be analyzed with care.

Moreover:

What about the level of effectiveness in generating concepts?

Concerning Functional Dec. and Morph. some of the criticisms refer to poor support to creativity. Maybe it affects the perceived effectiveness of the method, and then the perceived need to learn/apply it. But, how to fix this problem? is it sufficient to suggest creativity tools as support (maybe increasing learning difficulties)? Or is the functional logic that somehow hinders creativity?

@Lorenzo - Reasoning with functions (i.e., part of the "functional logic" you mention) requires certain linguistic skills - composing verb-noun phrases, knowing what a transitive verb is, etc. In teaching functional reasoning to design students I have noticed a certain aversion among students to deal with linguistics. One of the reasons why people choose to become designers seems to be that they weren't good at language in high school. Language is perhaps also considered "non-creative" by designers.

Regarding creativity tools - at the time I learned functional decomposition and morphology as a student, creativity tools were taught in combination with these methods, as a way to fill the cells it the morphological matrix. I don't see how creativity tools and functional decomposition should exclude each other.

@Imre - you'd like to see  opinions of industry representatives, but this is ResearchGate. Not too many of them here, I'm afraid. By the way, having worked in industry for 7 years before becoming an academic, I did use these methods quite frequently. Most of my colleagues did, too.

I had some students from technical high school (minor linguistic education), many from scientific high school (good linguistic education) and also some from "classical" high school (high linguistic and philosophical education), but I've never found a clear relationship between the high school type and the learning rate of the method. However, it could be interesting to verify...

What I observed (not rigorously) is that who comes from a technical background finds more difficulties in reasoning in abstract terms, rapidly jumping to a final solutions and with a poor design space exploration. While others (scientifics and classicals) are more inclined to reason abstractly, but find difficulties in moving toward concreteness. This, under certain aspects, is quite obvious. However, the problem seems to be not strictly related to the ability in expressing "functions", but to the management of abstraction and/or detail levels. Indeed, I also teach students with another "experimental" systematic CD approach which is based on general (i.e. not only functional) problem-solution sequences. In comparison with F.D. & M.,  students reports that they feel more confortable...but the problems related to abstraction remain.

I am using functional decomposition method in our design projects even today. It helps in genetating more than one idea for each function that results in many combination design ideas.  I rate and rank those combinations to proceed further.  The advantages I have experienced is time and resourse savings, I have alternate ready if the first one did not work.

Hope this answers your question

Thank you for your contribution Mr. Hariharasubramanian Ramasubramanian. Industry feedbacks are extremely important.

In your case, we have a positve feedback where we found some of the expected advantages related to FDM.

But, to me, the main question is: why in your case (like in other "lucky" ones) an "academic" method have reached the expected success, while in many other cases this did not happen?

does it depend on the industry sector?

does it depend on the personal (your) experience on the method (and your role in the firm)?

For example, novice engineers with some experience in (e.g.) FDM from university, could find extreme difficulties in "convincing" a firm staff (e.g. ignoring the recalled methods) about the potentialities of the approach. Diversely, if is a prominence figure of the firm (e.g. the CEO) that "asks" to adopt the method, I suppose that it is almost surely adopted...at least for a certain period of time.

There are a lot of questions that I could formulate to you...but, more generally, is the method used by the entire design staff? If yes, how do you convinced team members to adopt the method?