Influence made visible

One knows that engineering design is a complex and difficult activity, and generally agree that it can be eased, and thereby made more successful, if the designer´s understanding can be enhanced. But understanding of what? If the topology of a system (whether electronic, mechanical or otherwise) has been chosen, the problem remaining is that of selecting parameter values to lead to performances that lie within bounds specified by a customer. And if, as is often the case, the system is to be mass-produced, the problem becomes that of selecting a range (equivalently, a nominal value and tolerance) that will cause a majority-and hopefully 100%-of the mass-produced systems to be satisfactory. There´s an influence of considerable interest to the designer, and that is the influence of one performance on another. All designers value knowledge of trade-offs and correlations. The knowledge that the DC gain and phase margin of an opamp cannot be simultaneously maximised is of enormous value. The question now becomes, “how can one create a design tool that will allow a designer to explore, qualitatively but directly, the influence between all parameters and performances?“. An answer to this question is provided by the Influence Explorer and the Prosection Matrix, described by the author. Both are `visualisation tools´ which allow interactive exploration: that is, the posing of `what if?´ questions and immediate sight of the corresponding answers