An Overview of the Design Process (2) cont.

Concept generation
Typically, designers capture their ideas by sketching them on paper. Annotation helps identify key points so that their ideas can be communicated with other members of the company.

There are a number of techniques available to the designer to aid the development of new concepts. One of the most popular is brainstorming.

This technique involves generating ideas, typically in small groups, by saying any idea that comes into your head no matter how silly it may seem. This usually sparks ideas from other team members. By the end of a brainstorming session there will be a list of ideas, most useless, but some may have the potential to be developed into a concept. Brainstorming works better if the members of the team have different areas of expertise.

Concept evaluation
Once a suitable number of concepts have been generated, it is necessary to choose the design most suitable for to fulfil the requirements set out in the PDS. The product design specification should be used as the basis of any decision being made. Ideally a multifunction design team should perform this task so that each concept can be evaluated from a number of angles or perspectives. The chosen concept will be developed in detail.

One useful technique for evaluating concepts to decide on which one is the best is to use a technique called 'matrix evaluation'

With matrix evaluation a table is produced listing important the features required from a product - usually this list is drawn up from the important features described in the product design specification. The products are listed across the table. The first concept is the benchmark concept. The quality of the other concepts are compared against the benchmark concept for the required features, to help identify if the concept is better, worse than, or is the same as the benchmark concept. The design with the most 'better than' is likely to be the best concept to develop further.

Most people who use the matrix technique will assign points, rather than simple, better, worse, same, so that it is easier to identify which concepts are the best. It is also likely that some features of the design will be more important than others so a weighting is used.

Detail design
In this stage of the design process, the chosen concept design is designed in detailed with all the dimensions and specifications necessary to make the design specified on a detailed drawing of the design.

It may be necessary to produce prototypes to test ideas at this stage. The designer should also work closely with manufacture to ensure that the product can be made.

http://drawsketch.about.com/...//www.ider.herts.ac.uk/school/courseware/graphics/engineering_drawing/