Personal Engineering Design Process Overview
In Depth
1. Identify the Contributing Factors
Before you can start brainstorming well, you need to identify what to focus on. Every design has a set of criteria and constraints that it follows and meets. Usually it is ideal to have this well thought out before hand, as opposed to backtracking a design to the circumstances it has been created for.
2. Generate Ideas
This is the part of the process where the focus is to brainstorm a variety of ideas looking at different aspects of the problem. Keeping an open mind is critical to finding the right solution, as most times there is nothing obvious about the way to go about solving a problem. (i.e. that is why there is a question in the first place) Based on the contributing factors, a single idea can be evaluated. Further ideas should reflect and even incorporate the key positives of each design, while certain improvements have been added. In this manner, the process is recursive and involves many iterations (more on that in the final section)
From personal experience, I found that using creativity techniques like SCAMPER and TRIZ can be very helpful, especially when you are out of ideas. I found this particularly important when having to brainstorm solutions to a problem that was vaguely stated in the design brief.
From personal experience, I found that using creativity techniques like SCAMPER and TRIZ can be very helpful, especially when you are out of ideas. I found this particularly important when having to brainstorm solutions to a problem that was vaguely stated in the design brief.
The visual to the right shows the different parts of the SCAMPER technique. Each of these questions helps expand the idea generation and the breadth of the brainstorming process.
Visual found here.
3. Modeling and Prototyping
Having ideas is a start, but your design is mostly limited to how you envision it, that is until it can be modeled in some way. This can include sketches, diagrams, CAD models, physical prototypes, and so on. Regardless of the form, a model allows for a better understanding if the idea is the right fit. Usually the idea changes based on small misconceptions that were made in the brainstorming stage. As a more complete model is created, it becomes much easier to communicate to others how and why the design was developed. This is particularly important when giving progress reports and also when outside expertise is required. Eventually, a refined prototype or model is ready to tested and analyzed, which is the next step in the design process.
4. Testing and Analysis
With a concrete model of an idea, testing and analysis can begin. Based on the contributing factors from the start of the process, there should be a set of criteria that a design must meet. To judge whether or not the design is complete there must be some sort of evaluation performed. This can involve a great variety of testing including computational, structural, functional, safety, and so on. The results often indicate something needs to be changed and improved in order for it accomplish what it is supposed to. This might mean going back to the modeling stage or even the brainstorming and researching phases. That is why the next part of the process is iteration.
5. Iteration
Iteration can be the most significant aspect of an engineering design process. Generally a good design is the result of many failed attempts, each offering something positive until the right solution is found. Any weakness in something is only an opportunity to make improvements. By constantly repeating the first four steps, new experience and knowledge is present at every accumulating loop. The idea is that at some point, the design satisfies the requirements and it is completed. Yet, up until then it is not uncommon to start fresh at the beginning of the process and keep repeating the same steps.
Not only does my personal design process repeat itself in a cyclic fashion, but the individual steps can include iteration of their own. For example, when generating ideas, you constantly re-examine what you have so far, and restart the process before moving on to the modeling stage. You may end up with multiple ideas, which often get filtered as the process continues.
Not only does my personal design process repeat itself in a cyclic fashion, but the individual steps can include iteration of their own. For example, when generating ideas, you constantly re-examine what you have so far, and restart the process before moving on to the modeling stage. You may end up with multiple ideas, which often get filtered as the process continues.
The figure below shows the repetitive nature of my personal design process. Notice
that each node can include iteration of its own, such as the generating ideas stage.
that each node can include iteration of its own, such as the generating ideas stage.
See the artifacts section to get a more concrete representation of my personal design process.
