Visualizing information during early design

We visualize information by presenting it in pictorial, diagrammatic, or graphical ways. Compared to written text, a visualization can be more concise, more explanatory and revealing, and more usable. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it must be the right picture. A poor visualization is just as difficult to understand and just as useless as a poorly written text description. "Early design " includes the activities that precede the first CAD models of the product (i.e. the end of embodiment design): requirements engineering, concept design and evaluation, and systems architecting. In early design there is little if any information amenable to CAD representation, so other visualizations are necessary. There are no standards for such visualizations, so this paper cannot provide "canned" visualization solutions. Instead, we will (a) examine questions that must be posed by organizations to determine how they can visualize information to get "the right picture, " (b) offer routes that organizations can take to establish visualizations that are best suited to their situations, and (c) briefly describe some of the possible existent tools and methods to construct meaningful, usable visualizations