Environment-Based Design (EBD) Approach to Developing Quality Management Systems: a Case Study

This paper shows how to develop a manual for Quality Management System (QMS) by using a design methodology Environment Based Design (EBD). The EBD includes three interdependent design activities: environment analysis, conflict identification and solution generation. The EBD is particularly effective when customers’ wants are not clearly understood where designers can be given the right direction through the analysis of the product’s working environment. In the case study presented in this paper, the customer wanted to develop a quality manual for a flow monitoring service. The challenge was that the content and structure of the final manual were not clear to the designers. By taking this task as a design problem, the EBD was applied to analyse the current service including the organization structure, the business processes, and the existing documents. After critical conflicts were identified, the quality manual and a data processing software system were produced for the client. This application of the EBD shows its effectiveness as a generic design methodology.