Design effort is a key resource for product design projects. Environments where design effort is scarce, and therefore valuable, include hackathons and other time-limited design challenges. Predicting design effort needs is key to successful project planning; therefore, understanding design effort-influencing factors (objective considerations that are universally accepted to exert influence on a subject, that is, types of phenomena, constraints, characteristics, or stimulus) will aid in planning success, offering an improved organizational understanding of product design, characterizing the design space and providing a perspective to assess project briefs from the outset. This paper presents the Collaborative Factor Identification for Design Effort (CoFIDE) Method based on Hird's (2012) method for developing resource forecasting tools for new product development teams. CoFIDE enables the collection of novel data of, and insight into, the collaborative understanding and perceptions of the most influential factors of design effort levels in design projects and how their behavior changes over the course of design projects. CoFIDE also enables design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators to characterize their creative spaces, to quickly enable mutual understanding, without the need for complex software and large bodies of past project data. This insight offers design teams, hackathon teams, and makerspace collaborators opportunities to capitalize on positive influences while minimizing negative influences. This paper demonstrates the use of CoFIDE through a case study with a UK-based product design agency, which enabled the design team to identify and model the behavior of four influential factors.

Designers use their tacit knowledge to estimate project design effort needs, which can be enhanced through the understanding of the factors that most influence those needs. Evaluating and assessing project briefs against these factors can assist designers when planning their projects. The Collaborative Project Brief Scorecard (CPDS) Method identifies those factors and produces a scorecard for designers to evaluate project briefs based on these factors and allows for project comparisons, aids in past project recall and provides a focal point for collaborative reflection on design activities.

The present paper studies the process of information generation during design and focuses on the relationship between the information importance and the required effort for its generation. Multiple associative relationships among design entities (handled as design descriptors) are used to represent the design knowledge. The characteristics of the dependent and the primary descriptors are examined and their distinct roles in the design process are discussed. Term definitions concerning the information importance and the design effort are also introduced. The descriptors are used to form a matrix. A number of operations on this matrix results in its transformation, with the final matrix reflecting the quantitative relationship between the information importance and the design effort. From the aforementioned matrix, a unique sorted list for the primary design descriptors is produced. Following this list during descriptor instantiation ensures the production of design information of maximum importance with the least effort in the early design stages. The design of a belt conveyor is used as a basis for a better understanding of the theoretical analysis and for a demonstration of the use of the suggested descriptor list.