International Journal of Maritime Engineering

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF SHIP DESIGN

D Andrews, University College London, UK SUMMARY It is often stated that design is more art than science even when applied to something as technically complex as a ship. The paper briefly reviews the nature of both the scientific aspects of ship design and the traditional domain of art in design, often seen to be restricted to consideration of the aesthetics of the design. It is argued that if art is used to designate the creative aspects of design, then it is design synthesis to which it is most clearly applicable. The paper concludes with the argument that interactive computer graphics tied to a traditional ship synthesis based on numerical science now provides a true integration of the art and the science of ship design. With the use of simulation techniques allied to this modern approach to ship design approach ship designers now have the capability to achieve a creative and responsive approach to ship design. 1. INTRODUCTION about art than engineering (8). This advice was offered despite the fact that the vessel in question succumbed to a basic structural failure born from a non-engineering extrapolation of small boat structural practice to a relative large craft, without appropriately applying advanced engineering science. Rather than seeing engineering design, and our specific endeavour of ship design, as just another manifestation of engineering practice, one can draw on Bruce Archers (9) clear belief that design is different to both the humanities (with language as their medium) and the sciences (based on mathematics and symbols). Rather, design is a third culture with modelling as its medium (or possibly, as is discussed in Section 3, Coynes preference for metaphor (10)), as shown in Figure 1. This can then be contrasted to a view that only the arts are creative with the sciences and engineering being limited to rationality. Yet many scientists and, especially, mathematicians see elegant solutions as manifestations of a creative aesthetic (11, 12) and engineering designers typify good design as looking right (13). So the issue is far from straight forward and for that most complex of products, the naval combatant (14), even direct aesthetics is not totally irrelevant (15). Clearly in the case of cruise liners or mega yachts, aesthetics can appear to dominate the engineering design, as can be the case with modern building design (16). The issue of art and science in ship design is therefore far from obvious and I would like to consider it here by firstly addressing the scientific aspects, or strictly the application of the engineering sciences to ship design, and then consider what is meant by Art in ship design. As far as the latter is concerned it can be considered to consist of two elements; aesthetics in ship design, as a direct manifestation of the art in ship design, and design synthesis, as the art in ship design, where this is

An initial version of this paper was presented at the Institutions first International Symposium on Marine Design, at La Spezia in April 2006. This brought together naval architects and marine designers, particularly those active in the design of yachts and cruise ships. The paper presented to such an audience the viewpoint of a ship designer and specifically one who has written extensively on the Ship Design Process, Computer Aided (Preliminary) Ship Design (CAPSD) and the philosophy of ship design (1, 2, 3). In parallel with practicing as a ship designer over the last 35 years, the author has developed an approach to CAPSD based on an architectural view of ship design that exploits computer graphics techniques in producing an approach to ship design, which has recently been applied to real design tasks (4, 5). The view that ship design is both an art and a science can be seen to be consistent with the wider practice of engineering design (6). However it is often the case that the term art is used to denote the craft origins of first boat and then shipbuilding in the sense of the practical art of an artisan, rather than the more creative approach of an artist. So that at one extreme of the ship design spectrum, sailing yacht designers (typified by Uffa Fox) have traditionally been acknowledged to be intuitively better than scientifically trained designers. This view has persisted despite the fact that, in recent years, the application of engineering science based analysis has driven success in the most sophisticated yachting arena, that of competitive deep ocean racing. The eminent warship designer Rydill has taken exception to the use of art in reference to ship design, seeing it as often a cloak concealing a lack of awareness of the importance of using science where ever it can be used (7). In support of his assertion one might readily instance the unhelpful view of the designer of the Team Philips large catamaran :- Advice to a young engineer: Always to think more

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seen as the creative element in the ship design process. The second of these considerations leads on to the authors contention that the architectural dimension should be given equal prominence with the traditional technical aspects of the design synthesis and this concurrency can then be achieved specifically by means of the UCL Design Building Block approach (3). This approach does not only give the ship designer more scope to integrate the element of art into ship design but furthermore, by enabling emerging computer based simulation tools to be readily part of the design synthesis, is fostering a true integration of personnel driven aspects in marine technology. This can be seen as broadening the application of science to include the human sciences as well as including, in the art of ship design, modern simulation techniques.

2.

SCIENCE APPLIED TO SHIP DESIGN

Naval architects are seen as the profession most directly concerned with the design of ships. As such they may be considered to be the maritime equivalent of architects of the built environment, but there are significant differences from building architecture. This is due to naval architecture clearly being one of the engineering professions, in that naval architects provide the equivalent of the built environments civil/structural engineering capability, while the naval architect is also the ship design equivalent to the architect in providing the holistic design input. However, since the founding of the naval architectural profession in the ninetieth century it has focused its education and research on the application of the disciplines of engineering science rather than the core skill of ship design, which was traditionally left to be learnt on the job. The next big step forward in ship design practice occurred with the advent of computers, in the second half of the last century, when the analytical power of computers enabled naval architects to tackle in a more scientific manner, what still remains, an exceedingly complex set of physical phenomena that constitute the behaviour of a ship in a seaway. Figure 2 summarises the various disciplines relevant to ship design. A trimaran example has been used to emphasise that a ship designer should not rule out unconventional hull forms (or even other than wholly displacement vessels). Of the eleven, somewhat arbitrary, groupings of issues relevant to ship design shown in Figure 2, some seven could be regarded as engineering sciences, one is the true art of aesthetics, one that of human factors or ergonomics, one management related and finally there is design itself, as the raison detre of naval architecture (17).

Figure 1. Archers vision of Design as the Third Culture (9)

Figure 2. An indication of the disciplines relevant to ship design

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A second way of looking at the naval architects concerns in ship design is through the S5 categories, namely Speed, Stability, Seakeeping, Strength and Style (18). Of these, the first four are the historic engineering science based ship disciplines, while Style can be seen as a way of covering the art/design concerns, although it is such a generalised category that it can also encompass some of the more recent engineering disciplines, such as availability, reliability and maintainability (ARM), human factors and even management or systems engineering or the ilities (19). If we initially concentrate just on the four engineering science ship disciplines : Speed is really short hand for the field of Resistance and Propulsion, largely founded by William Froude, and even with the capabilities emerging from ever more sophisticated computational fluid dynamics analysis, the need for experimental ship research tanks remains due to the intractable nature of operating at the interface of two media. Thus, in hydrodynamics the ship designer needs to retain his experimental art, despite extensive computer aids to design analysis. Stability can be seen as the oldest of the ship sciences and fundamental to safety. Computer analysis has enabled the designer to readily investigate more and more ship conditions from very early in the design process. Despite this, as the ongoing discussions under the auspices of IMO (20) reveal, there remains considerable scope for designers to interpret what, again, remains a gross simplification of a complex phenomenon in a seaway, further compounded by the ships response to damage. Seakeeping was often seen as the exercise of the ship designers true art until computational tools were provided to crunch the joint demands of strip theory representation of ship response and the statistical analysis of the randomness of the seaway (21). Again there remain limitations to be appreciated and judgements made which still stretch the ship designers art. Furthermore one might argue that the historic divisions of resistance and propulsion, hydrostatic stability, seakeeping and indeed manoeuvrability are an acknowledgement that we are some way from an integrated engineering science of the general dynamics of marine vehicles. Strength of ship structures has often implied (for most ship designers but not those designing warships and submarines) the routine application of classification society rules but, increasingly, diversity and the pressures to achieve greater structural efficiencies (however those are defined) means that more understanding of structural responses to complex operating and extreme loadings (22) is once more stretching the ship structural designers art. It remains the case, both in synthesising a new structural typology and in

achieving an economically efficient configuration, that analysis can still only inform the designer after the design event, albeit in a more interactive manner. Thus while the art of ship design might be thought to be restricted to the ships visual aesthetics and whole ship synthesis, as Ferguson (23) pointed out, for general engineering design, there are a vast number of decisions constantly being undertaken by the engineering designer. These are made not just at the initial synthesis stage but through out the design process, on all elements of the design. These decisions can be seen as examples of the designers art and, if anything, the advances in computer analysis, when allied ever more to interactive CAD systems, place an ever greater decision making burden on the designer. This is such that the art of the designer, with regard to the scientific basis of engineering design, has significantly changed from what can I do to what is it sensible to do and when and to what degree. 3. THE ART OF SHIP DESIGN

Dealing initially with the more obvious manifestation of art in ship design, then it might be suspected that someone who has spent their design career in naval ship design would have little insight into the role aesthetics plays in the design of many non-naval ships where their appearance is clearly recognised to be of greater significance. However, a few years ago, amongst a range of ship projects the author was managing was the first set of studies into the replacement of the Royal Yacht BRITANNIA. Here was a vessel where the equivalent of the military characteristics of a warship was a combination of its outward appearance and a strong focus on the internal configuration and decor of the features contributing to achieving the Yachts royal functions. Thus aesthetics could be seen to be a major design driver, alongside the S4 aspects, as well as specific concerns over lean manning, through life efficiency of the propulsion and service machinery, security and ecological issues, all of which made the year long study very much an exercise of the ship designers art. As far as the outward appearance was concerned the image we were seeking was not that of an ultra modern style typical of mega-yachts but rather something more timeless as the new yacht was expected to have a similarly long service life and should not be outmoded by fashions in ship appearance. This almost inevitably meant that, aside from the obvious visual components of balance, coherence and clean lines, the ships appearance ended up with many of the characteristics of the existing BRITANNIA, namely a single buff coloured funnel, a continuous white superstructure and a royal blue hull (see Figure 3 for artists impression). A classic feature of the ship designs art of compromise concerned the desire for a 21st Century royal yacht to be able to accommodate a helicopter landing at the stern, while still retaining one of BRITANNIAs most successful features, namely a stern facing sun lounge aft of the state cabins. When it

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came to the main functional spaces, the ante-room and the dinning room, together with the associated access spaces, the ship designers task was to provide as large a set of working spaces as possible (improving over their limited sizes in the existing vessel), within what remained a relatively small ship resulting from the very tight overall financial budget. It was envisaged that once the project had got its go ahead, which sadly from the design teams point of view did not in the end occur, that the actual aesthetics of the interior public spaces would have been delegated to an appointed interior designer, just had occurred with the appointment of Sir Hugh Casson in the case of HMRY BRITANNIA (24, 25)

It should not be thought that the team of warship designers had approached the above study with little experience in employing a marine artist to both advise on the visual characteristics of future designs and provide an artists impression of such studies. In fact the artist employed was one that had been a regular adjunct to our warship concept design team. This had come about some ten years previously when my predecessor as the Head of Concept Design, in the UK Ship Department, David Brown, had got Ken Donnelly, to be the aesthetic advisor and the producer of artists impressions for our range of ship concepts. These were produced over some two years

Figure 3. Donnellys Artists Impression of 1989 Replacement Royal Yacht Study

Figure 4. A selection of artists impressions of UK Ship Concept Studies (26)

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of intensive studies, which led to many of the ship classes in the current British fleet (e.g. Type 23 Frigate, SANDOWN minehunters, FORT VICTORIA auxiliaries, Landing Platform Helicopter carrier) plus a range of other studies illustrated in the book David Brown produced after he retired (26), some of which are shown in Figure 4. This realisation of the importance of the immediate visual impact of a design study came from the appreciation that many high level political and naval decision makers were provided with such images from a variety of sources and, lacking professional ship design capability themselves, could be unduly influenced by the direct visual representation, particularly if, as had often been the case, the in-house design studies were just numerical descriptions plus a line drawing. In parallel with this UK approach to naval ship aesthetics, a debate had started in the US Navy with the realisation that the Soviet Navy were employing an industrial design bureau to advise their ship design bureau as to how to make the latest Soviet warships visually impressive. This could be said to have reached its apogee with the supercruiser KIEV, whose bow was adorned with an enormous gold star and its stern with the ships name in massive gold letters, but perhaps more relevant to ship aesthetics was the clear style sought, with lines of visual force giving Soviet ships a purposefulness seen to be lacking in the ostensibly rational and boxy style of the, then, current US Navy designs (see Figure 5 taken from Ref. 15). Another publication of relevance is an article by Ken Donnelly published in The Naval Architect, which makes the very important point that visual coherence can be provided to most ship designs without compromising their functional efficiency, and therefore ship designers have no excuse if they produce designs that are devoid of visual delight or at least a coherent aesthetic or style (27). If this might be seen to denigrate UK naval ship designers, that would be a false impression; UK naval ship designs produced in the second half of the last century have a clear house style which is generally clean and visually coherent and quite different from both the US Navys boxy style or

the Soviet Navys forceful appearance. Perhaps the clearest demonstration of that UK style was one of the earliest that of Sir Rowland Bakers St LAURENT escorts for the Canadian Navy (see Figure 6). Baker wished to give this first indigenous Canadian naval ship design a striking appearance, so not only does it follow many of the visual rules Donnelly suggests, it even exhibits a forward rake to the transom and the quarter deck cut down, which are at the same angle as the stem intended to visually convey the impression of forward speed. As part of a longstanding annual lecture on ship design to the UCL Masters course in naval architecture, the author draws the attention of students, who have been educated in hard engineering, to the fact that aesthetics applied to ship design is far from subjective. Too often engineers use the adage that beauty is in the mind of the beholder to then ignore the appearance of their products or leave it to an industrial designer to beautify, because aesthetics are seen to lack objectivity or just be a question of fashion (28). Yet good engineering designers readily appreciate it is possible to provide visual fitness or even delight, so not only is Donnellys insight, born of practice, that visual coherence, in most instances, is readily achievable but also that there are a clear set of rules to be followed, which can improve the visual appearance of any ship design. These were outlined by Guiton (29) when considering yachts and liners but have a more general applicability and can be summarised as: Clarity of form; Honesty in reflecting the function(s) of the vessel; Grouping of visual masses appropriately conveying visual balance; Consistency, especially with regard to visual details; An adequate visual focal point, probably aligned with the Dunn curve (30); The overall composition should convey a grand scale and be pleasing to look at.

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Figure 5 Comparison of US Navy and Soviet ship design aesthetics (15)

Figure 6 HMCS St LAURENT (31) The second aspect of ship design, where art could be said to be most clearly present due to the essential creative element in it, is that of design synthesis. This is often seen by the essentially pragmatically driven engineer as either totally emergent from the functional needs and constraints (and therefore rational rather than creative) or mysterious and almost not to be probed or rationalised for fear of destroying the creative spark. The author happens to think neither of these views is helpful, nor indeed correct. The former could be seen to be exemplified by the systems engineering approach, where the architecturally out-moded style term form follows function has been used under a banner of Requirements Engineering. This is an approach which several naval ship designers have directly critiqued (32, 33, 3). The second, mysterious, view of design synthesis is not really tenable since the design field itself has been the subject of considerable debate since the 1960s (see

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Design Studies (34, 35)). Furthermore, in ship design the extensive use of computers in initial design has led to a clear need to better understand the initial design process, while ensuring the development of such CAD tools genuinely aids designers. This is a necessity since these tools, if not designed to be interactive and leaving the decision making with the human designer, can overly constrain designers, often without them being aware of the underlying limitations in the computer programs they are using to synthesise new designs (3). By way of some insight being grasped, within what this author acknowledges still remains a far from simple process, Figure 7 was produced (3) to indicate the elements involved in the synthesis of a complex ship design. While the lower part of the diagram shows the essential physical elements in the design description of the ship (on the right hand side) and the transversal concerns (on the left hand side), acting often on the whole entity of the emerging design, what is of direct relevance to the current discussion is the explanation of the synthesis process shown at the top. This draws on two general papers on design; one by Daley (34) seeking an explanation for the individual designers creative spark, arising from their idiosyncratic stamp (made up of a visual schema, a linguistic schema and a value schema

possibly seen as an extension of Bruce Archers model reproduced as Figure 1), and the second from Darke (35), based on the views of practicing built environment architects. This study revealed that architects seek a key or primary generator as the basis for a new design concept and then use this in the buildings subsequent design evolution. This latter idea has been retrospectively checked by scrutinising the reminiscences of the designers of several RN ship designs (36), where, in each case, the lead designer clearly identified either a single feature or a set of related choices that enabled the design to jell which then remained the key for the subsequent design evolution, as the (or a major) design driver (37). In the initial state of art report on Design Methods, produced for the 1997 International Marine Design Conference, the first section, by the author, was entitled Design Theory and Design Research and surveyed general theories of design for their relevance both to engineering design and wider design practice, rather than just marine design (38). That IMDC report served to put marine design methods in a broader design methodological context and the journal, Design Studies, continues to act as a forum for those cross disciplinary researchers who might be classed as design methodologists. In the specific field of engineering design, textbooks are continually being produced,

Figure 7 A (partial) representation of the ship design process and ship definition (3)

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ranging from those providing strategies for product design (39) to works of a more philosophical nature and therefore relevant to understanding the nature of art and science in ship design. In the latter context the author wishes to consider the insights provided by two publications previously discussed in this journal (3), one by Ferguson (23), a technological historian, entitled, Engineering and the Minds Eye and one by Coyne (10), a computer scientist, whose theme is Designing Information Technology in the Post Modern Age From Methods to Metaphor. Fergusons book says much about the art of the practice of engineering design which rings true because design, as practiced by engineers, is as much a matter of intuition and non-verbal thinking as of applying equations and performing computations. Thus design is done essentially in the mind and so drawing (and, by extension, producing the computer graphics image) provides an extension to the mind as an external (and reliable) memory. Given that Ferguson sees engineering design as the result of a social process and subject to unforeseen complications and influences as the design develops, it follows that The precise outcome cannot be deduced from its initial goal; furthermore Design is nota formal sequential processsummarised by a block diagram, and The vision at the heart of the design is often in a designers mind long before the need has been anticipated. Alongside many other pertinent comments on the fact that engineering analysis can only be performed on a simplified model of reality, which is reinforced by the earlier comments on S4 showing its relevance to ship design practice, Ferguson says of Design layouts and calculation that they require dozens of small decisions and hundreds of tiny ones, because the typography of a new thing is astonishingly unconstrained and because numerical calculations always involved human judgement. This perspective firmly places engineering design as a very human process, involving many cultural and social constraints and inputs, and drawing parallels with Daleys schema. It can also be seen as a challenge to current and future designers to recognise and maintain the art of design, given that increasingly design is undertaken in a CAD environment, which if not properly designed itself can reduce the designer to a mere CAD operator. Although Coynes work subjects design and development in Information Technology to a critique, which uses the entire range of contemporary philosophical thinking, his broader analysis of design theories is relevant to the issue of art and science in design. Thus he charts:1. First Generation design models seen as codified procedures to be selected and rigidly applied in a manner not unlike conventional ship design practice (see Jones (40); Second Generation models are seen as more empirical, aiming to help the designer to be creative (see Broadbent (41); thus design is seen not to be

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inductive but rather abductive, i.e. making premises from conclusions or backward reasoning, again clear parallels in the dependency on previous solutions in ship design; Generative models, which see design as transiting through a set of states with rules or actions to assist the transit; thus Heuristics are seen to be rules of thumb but primarily serving to reveal dead ends, avoid unproductive searches, and for planning action sequences, further parallels in ship design associated with reducing the open endedness of the design task; Topological models, unlike induction, which was (historically) seen as the way scientific discovery occurred in deriving generalisation from many instances, explain design as production of an instant from generalisation i.e. style choice, which arises from architectures recognition of functionalism as yet another style (see Ref 3 for ship design parallels); Cognitive models which draw on understanding of the working of the brain (e.g. fuzzy logic, non-monotonic inference, neural networks, simulated annealing (i.e. finding the lowest point on a solution surface) and complexity where simple rules apparently lead to complex behaviour), the use of multi-criteria approaches and the current plethora of Genetic Algorithm based applications in ship design is part of this trend (42).

In all this, whereas in science a method or model is reliable if it produces the same result, such a feature is clearly not the case in design. Thus for design, quite unlike science or even engineering analysis (once the necessary simplifying judgements have been made), Coyne asserts there are no formulaic theories just generalisations. Rather, Coyne concludes, with a typically post-modernist stance drawing on the philosophy of Heidegger, that metaphors are better at representing design than models, as the former are not predictive. Thus (metaphor) is primarily a discursive tool to keep conversation alive and its efficacy resides in its adoption and use in discourse. This then approaches design from a highly philosophical stance, but more pragmatically, in emphasising the vital role of communication in any complex design activity, it provides a very clear link to actual design practice, where communication is vital in initial design (3) and in the multi-disciplinary development phases (2). The vital role of communication also reinforces this authors belief in the power of graphical description in complex design synthesis, such that creative exploration is consequently fostered and the graphical description provides the means of communicating design intent and issues to all the stakeholders. For the recent 2006 International Marine Design Conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan the author produced a new State of the Art Report on Design Methodology (42). This updates the 1997 review by particularly drawing on recent discussions around the philosophy of design (43) to see if these could provide insights into the

2.

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nature of design synthesis for large and complex artefacts such as ships. All this serves to reinforce the view that recognising the art in ship design is not a means to avoid rational debate and/or avoid adopting developments in design technology and methodology, as earlier noted from Rydills concern over art in design. Rather such a recognition is seen as a valid parallel endeavour in design to that of applying engineering science, which has, until recently, dominated the advances in ship design. As part of this broadening view of the art and science of ship design, it is appropriate to conclude by looking at a means that, the author believes, can best integrate science and art in initial ship design. 4. A SYNTHESIS OF ART AND SCIENCE A MODERN APPROACH TO SHIP ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN

which are themselves constrained within the largely hydrodynamically determined form, can then be designed and then only within these heavily constrained boundaries. As the means to break free of this sequential process, the logic of an integrated approach to ship synthesis was encapsulated by Figure 8 and is born from a recognition that the early use of computer graphics, to incorporate the internal architecture, will improve ship design. Thus the integration of architecture in ship sizing, at the commencement of the design process, is best accomplished by using computer graphics to build up the ships internal architecture, which can then be used to feed the traditional numerical sizing synthesis. The paper describing the UCL prototype surface ship Design Building Block system - SURFCON (44) outlined its application to preliminary naval ship design, although the main approach has also been used at UCL for naval auxiliaries and merchant ships, so is considered to have a general applicability. With the incorporation of SURFCON in GRCs ship design system PARAMARINE in 2001 (45), this philosophy has now been extended to a wide range of conventional and advanced surface ship types (5). Figure 8 summarises a comprehensive set of analysis processes, most of which are unlikely to be used in the initial setting up of the design or for early iterations around the sequence of selecting and locating design building blocks, wrapping around them a hull geometric definition and performing a weight, displacement and size balance. In fact several of the inputs shown in that figure are either specific to the

Preliminary ship design is increasingly being seen in terms of its computer tools and the means of obtaining a perceived optimum solution from the large number of computer generated variants of a given, computer produced, baseline option (42). Until the correctly sized concept has been refined to achieve an optimised hull form, there is usually little consideration, or even a positive avoidance, of investigating the ships configuration or architecture, beyond an assumption that it will largely follow previous similar ships. It is only well into Feasibility or even the subsequent Ship Design/Contract Definition phase, that the specific layout and its interaction with the naval architectural aspects, such as structural features and ship systems routings,
RADICAL IDEAS
BALANCE INDICATION WEIGHT INVENTORY
Cost Model

FUNCTIONAL HIERARCHY DECOMPOSITION MODEL Space Definition

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Databases

Weap

Cont Weapons Acc Command

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HYDROSTATICS

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SYSTEM WEIGHT

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Access & Margin Policy

Geometric Definition
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GENERAL ARRANGEMENT DETAILED LAYOUT

Completeness Check

Space/ Weight Algorithms

Resistance and Propulsion

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HULLFORM MODEL

Figure 8. Design Building Block approach applied to Surface Ships (44)

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naval combatant case, such as topside features, or do not specifically detail aspects which could be dominant in specialist vessels, such as aircraft carriers, amphibious warfare vessels or cruise liners and large ferries, where personnel and vehicle flow dominate the internal ship configuration and as such can become prime topics for simulation modelling to better determine that configuration A further feature of the Design Building Block approach, that was outlined in some detail for the UCL prototype system and which has been fully incorporated in the SURFCON element of PARAMARINE, is that of the "Functional" breakdown. This was adopted in preference to the usual weight breakdown system, essentially based on the shipbuilding trades (i.e. steel, machinery, electrics and outfit) and with slightly more subdivisions in the case of naval vessels. This more functional breakdown (i.e. float, move, fight or operations and infrastructure) has two distinct advantages. Firstly, the more traditional breakdown can inhibit the designer from considering radical solutions, not just to the layout but also to the engineering choices, despite the fact that the early introduction of the architectural element is seen as a means of exploring more innovative configurations. Secondly, with a separation of the basic ship aspects in the float and move categories, the fight (in the naval ship case) or operations (in the auxiliary or commercial ship cases) can be readily broken down into a clear hierarchy. This then enables the designer to readily respond to the owner or user's request for the impact of additions or deletions to the operational capabilities, which are usually of prime interest in reducing cost or exploring capabilities. A further feature brought across from the UCL prototype was the use of the term Master Building Block to denote how the overall aggregated attributes of the Design Building Blocks were brought together (manually in the 1997 prototype) to provide the numerical description of the resultant ship design. The advantage of providing the Design Building Block capability of SURFCON as an adjunct to the already established ship design suite of PARAMARINE, means the audited building block attributes within the Master Building Block can then be directly used by PARAMARINE. Thus the necessary naval architectural calculations can then be performed to ascertain the balance, or otherwise, of the configuration just produced by the designer (4). The Design Building Block approach is both intended to foster innovative design solutions and is not "hard wired" or has set routines to achieve naval architecturally balanced ship solutions, so it is required to be used by a capable ship designer, who can exploit the capabilities of the system and also produce coherent and balanced ship design studies. In other words a designer able to undertake both the art and the science of ship design. So it certainly cannot be used directly by a ship requirements owner or ship operator who wishes to see if a set of requirements, be they naval "fight" capabilities or

business operations parameters, then requires a ship of X tonnes costing Y dollars. The system, in auditing a new configuration of building blocks, will report to the designer the state of the design. Thus, say, moving a dense block further aft may result in the trim changing noticeably and/or the appropriate stability criteria no longer being met, and this will then be pointed out to the designer. However rather than then automatically changing the dimensions and or the hull parameters, which might be the case in a "black box" system, SURFCON-PARAMARINE will tell the designer where the design is no longer balanced. The designer can make the decision that he or she considers appropriate to the design, drawing on what are perceived to be the imperatives for the given study at that juncture. The general procedure to be adopted in producing a new ship design study is summarised in the 2003 SURFCON paper (4). Each Design Building Block, as the fundamental component of the SURFCON approach, can be regarded as an object in the design space and as a "placeholder" or "folder" containing all the information relating to a particular function within the functional hierarchy. The manner in which the design can be manipulated on the screen is also spelt out in Ref.4. The "design audit" object permits the designer to add whole ship margins and characteristics, such as accommodation demands, and then allows the design description to be audited for any of the characteristics entered. Results can be displayed using the Functional Group hierarchy or a traditional weight / space group system (if one has been defined). This "design audit" object is then assessed for a range of design infringements by other objects in the design space. The incorporation of SURFCON within PARAMARINE gives access to a wide range of analytical tools to check the naval architectural viability of the SURFCON description, including the whole ship characteristics held in the Master Building Block. The range includes: Stability calculations against several stability criteria; Powering analysis for a range of assessments, using most well established methods and methodical series; Seakeeping analysis for typical wave spectra; Longitudinal strength analysis; Ship vulnerability; Dynamic analysis; Manoeuvring;

and, additionally, simulations utilising the technical and graphical description of the design can be readily interfaced (46). Figures 9 and 10 give visual screen shots of two typical SURFCON outputs. Figure 9 shows a section through an early study of an aircraft carrier which was produced by cutting through the graphic model and shows the three dimensional conflict for the designer, who has to resolve the juxtaposition of the hangar, the aircraft lifts, the air ordinance lifts from the magazines,

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the main machinery air intakes and uptakes, before tackling the normal ship demands of personnel movement and access, ship service runs and the need to operate, maintain and replace equipment and stores, all within a structural configuration able to resist efficiently the rigours of extreme environments. Without such a graphical representation, tied to the necessary naval architectural analysis tools in PARAMARINE, it is doubtful that the many issues the designer needs to juggle can be readily assessed and handled interactively

(47). With this approach the design process can be speed up and alternatives explored while the concept is still being evolved. Figure 10 is a composite of a study into Design for Production investigation done in combination with a shipyard (48). The design shown is based on a VT corvette and half of it shows the design internals of the study while the other half shows the ship envelop. This was produced as a presentation visualisation and can be seen as a means to illustrate aesthetically the ship designers art.

Figure 9. A section through the carrier concept showing the three dimensional conflicts between hangar, machinery and air ordinance lift arrangements (47)

Figure 10. A corvette Design for Production study reproduced to show the presentational advantages of CASD graphics (48)

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5.

CONCLUSIONS

7. 8. 9. 10.

In reviewing the art and science of ship design, this paper suggests that the term art and science when applied to ship design is really misleading. There is art in application of the sciences, applied to ship design at the analytical level, and more science both in incorporating aesthetics in the design and, certainly, in design synthesis than is usually acknowledged. By this the author means science in the sense of rational and coherent thought, to be seen in comparison with the art of the artist, who often exploites random events, or even the art of the artisan, even when it is somewhat constrained in an era of computer aided design. Certainly it is believed that what is traditionally considered to be subjective, both in ship aesthetics and in design synthesis is amenable to a rational scientific approach. Despite this, art, in the artisan sense, does remain present in the nature of design practice, as Ferguson insists (23). Furthermore, a further facet of art, associated with the creative element, has now been restored to initial ship synthesis design by the advances in computer graphics. As the authors Design Building Block approach, coupled with a state of the art CASD system, has now demonstrated through a range of actual design studies undertaken by the UCL Design Research team (5), science and art can be integrated together in preliminary ship design. Beyond that, the current developments, to incorporate personnel and freight simulation into the graphically driven preliminary ship synthesis design, mean that all three of Archers cultures (or even Daleys schema) can now be comprehended together to provide creative and exploratory ship design, through a comprehensive marriage of art and science. REFERENCES 1. 2. Andrews, D J: - "Creative Ship Design", Trans RINA 1981. Andrews, D J: - A Comprehensive Methodology for the Design of Ships (and Other Complex Systems), Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series A (1998) 454, p.187-211, Jan 1998. Andrews, D J: - A Creative Approach to Ship Architecture, International Journal of Maritime Engineering 2003 (Discussion IJME 2004) Trans RINA Vol 145. Andrews D J and Pawling, R: - SURFCON A 21st Century Ship Design Tool, IMDC 03, Athens, May 2003. Andrews D J and Pawling, R: - The Application of Computer Aided Graphics to Preliminary Ship Design, IMDC 06, Ann Arbor MN, May 2006. Wallace, K: - Educating Engineers in Design, Royal Academy of Engineering, London, Feb 2005

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

3.

4. 5.

6.

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2007: Royal Institution of Naval Architects