Engineering Design and Customer Needs (Week 5) Flashcards
What is Design?
- Design is the quest for simplicity and order
- Design is the process of inventing artifacts that display a new physical order, organization, and/or form in response to function
- Design is a conscious and intuitive effort directed toward the ordering of the functional, material, and visual requirements of a problem
- Design is an orderly process of collecting, recording, and analyzing all the facts and data needed to arrive at a satisfactory solution to a problem
What are the different types of engineering design?
- Selection Design—choose item(s) from a catalog
- Configuration Design—organize the packaging of components
- Parametric Design—finding variables or parameters
- Redesign, Alternative Design modifying an existing product
- Original Design—develop a totally new product
What is configuration design
- Selection and arrangement of components for a product
- Selection and arrangement of features on a part
It has factors of:
Spatial limitations - Product interactions with other physical objects
and the user(s) - Maintenance
- Wear
- Desired customization by the user
- Need to include standard parts and assemblies
- Need to conform to industrial standards
- Need to replace consumable materials
What is an analysis problem?
Analysis Problem is a well-defined problem with one correct solution
What is a design problem?
Design Problem is an ill-defined problem with numerous satisfactory solutions
What is design influence on product quality
Quality results from a combination of factors that
are the responsibility of the design engineer
* Decisions made during the design process
determine the product’s quality as perceived by
the customers
* Quality cannot be built into a product unless it is
designed into it
Who can be a customer?
In most cases, there is more than one customer
* Consumer
* Society
* Manufacturing
* Marketing/Sales
* Regulatory agencies
* Environment
Remember: Customers drive product development, not the designer
What is the importance of customer research?
Customer research is essential to developing any new product or service
* Without a complete understanding of your customers’ wants and needs, you may be developing a product that is out of sync with your market and ultimately doomed to failure
* Particularly challenging for original designs and new product categories
How can we determine customer needs?
- A variety of methods may be used to determine the
needs and wants of potential customers: - Use existing feedback
- Surveys
- Customer interviews
- Focus groups
- Competitive analysis
- Just ask them
- The methods used by most companies to determine
customer preferences and needs are highly guarded
trade secrets
What do customer requirements have to be?
Must be discriminatory:
* Requirements must reveal the differences between alternatives
* Requirements should serve to distinguish alternatives from one another during evaluation
Must be measurable:
* Ideally, all identified requirements are measurable
* Requirements should be quantifiable and objective
* Avoid vague and subjective terms
Must be orthogonal:
* Each requirement should identify a unique feature of the alternative
* Requirements should not overlap
* Often difficult because overlapping is hard to identify
* e.g., Two criteria proposed by a company:
* Product must provide a smooth ride over rough roads
* Product should reduce shocks from bumps
Must be universal:
* A universal requirement characterizes an important attribute of all of the proposed alternatives
* Applicable to all alternatives under consideration
* If only some alternatives have the measured feature, then it is not universal and either the issue is not well defined or some of the alternatives have features not consistent with the issue being addressed
Must be external to problem:
* Must not impose design choices
* Consider example of buying a performance car:
* Want 0 to 100 kph in under 5 seconds
* Acceleration is discriminatory, measureable and universal
* Want six-cylinder engine
* Not orthogonal to acceleration
* May relate to other desired qualities
* Internal feature, should not be important to the selection of a car
What is a Product Design Specification (PDS)?
Product Design Specification (PDS) list:
* Is a detailed summary of the design requirements to be met in order to produce a successful product or process
How do you create a Product Design Specification (PDS) List?
- Write a separate specification for each element of the
PDS list - If possible, the specification should be expressed in
quantitative terms, and when appropriate it should
give limits within which acceptable performance lies - Performance attributes may be divided into:
i. Attributes that must be satisfied
ii. Attributes that would be nice to satisfy
How do you balance costumer and design needs
We satisfy customer requirements by designing a product that is characterized by certain specifications. Customer requirements are linked with product design specifications by a QFD
