The engineering design process, the kind of work that you can tell from the name alone, isn’t for the fainthearted. You need the willingness, the resolve, and the bloody-mindedness to keep going in the face of many setbacks and challenges, or, in some cases, the nerve to quit. Now that sounds quite interesting, so what is it exactly?
According to The Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), the engineering design process is an iterative workflow for devising components, products, or systems to meet specific needs. ABET says the process uses the applied sciences to turn resources into a practical, useful object. At this point, you wonder, “Why does a formal definition of anything always sound awfully boring and mouthful?” Boring as the definition might be, it’s true.
The definition goes on to state that the fundamental parts of the process involve specifying the objectives, conducting analysis, constructing, running tests, and performing evaluation. In general, not entirely unlike the empirical way of the scientific method. If we’re talking specifically about product design, the process needs to take into account some realistic constraints such as budgets, technical feasibility, user-friendliness, environmental impact, and so forth.
Because an engineering design process can be as complex as ABET suggests, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that everybody needs assistance from experienced engineering design professionals and designers to develop a new product. And by “everybody” we do mean absolutely everybody, from creative inventors and startups to design firms and big companies. When it comes to hiring NPD (New Product Development) professionals, Cad Crowd has consistently been at the top of the recommendation list. It has a massive network of talents you need, flexible hiring options, affordable rates, and, best of all, a guarantee of design accuracy.
What’s in an engineering design process?
The expectation is that when you’ve finished the process and done so well, you’ll end up with engineering solutions for crafting a new product. A solution can be as simple as a ball bearing to reduce friction in a mechanical system, or as complex as using 3D printing services to fabricate intricate parts. It can also be as exceedingly complex as creating a high-tech communication device or building an engine from the ground up. Despite the wide variety of products, functions, and features, the engineers working on them follow roughly the same steps throughout the design process.
- Problem Identification: You can’t develop a solution for a problem unless there’s a problem that needs solving to begin with. From the business side of things, a problem signals a market opportunity you can pursue. Perhaps you can create a product, offer it as a solution to the problem, and make a profit from it.
- Research: the next step is to analyze the problem to gather more information. Why does this problem exist? Has anyone attempted to solve it before? Have any of those attempts succeeded? If they failed, why and how miserably did they fail?
- Solution Ideas: Knowing that a problem exists and that no one has a good solution, now it’s time to ask yourself whether there’s something you can do to solve it. And for every idea you have, how different is it from the others? This is the point where the actual design process begins. The design engineer and designer handle much of the work here, conducting experiments and simulations to generate possible solutions, in this case, a concept. They produce sketches and CAD drawings, which eventually become some sort of formula, or a recipe that they like to refer to as “product requirements,” just to make it sound a bit more technical.
- Prototypes: based on the product requirements, the process steps into the prototyping phase. The prototype is typically known as the Proof of Concept (PoC) model. But this won’t be the only prototype you need to build. There will be many more before you get to the final production version.
- Evaluation: Every prototype iteration must undergo a series of tests and evaluations to determine how well it works, or whether it works at all. In a proper evaluation, the product (or prototype) is tested across various usage scenarios to assess usability, performance, durability, and overall alignment with the product requirements.
- Refinements: The data gathered from the evaluation phase serves as a guide for improving the product. Refinements can take many forms, such as better materials or a simpler user interface. Sometimes a prototype needs a complete redesign if you discover serious flaws during evaluation. Steps 4, 5, and 6 run in a loop due to the iterative nature of the tasks. When the prototype design experts finally builds a prototype that meets all the product requirements, the circle stops spinning, so you can move on to the next phase.
- Production: the design is finalized and ready for mass production.
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It’s a systematic method that engineers and designers follow to develop a functional product that solves (presumably) a complex problem. This makes good sense because if the problem is anything but complex and intricate, there’s little point in spending time, money, and effort on the whole exercise. Say a toy car makes squeaky noises each time you open and close one of the doors. It doesn’t take a licensed engineer to determine that the hinges need some lubrication. When you’re talking about the engineering design process, the “identified problem” is likely a whole lot more complicated than that.
It’s worth noting that the engineering design process is often collaborative and multidisciplinary. You’ll need input from an industrial designer, a prototype fabricator, a programmer if the product is an electronic device, a market researcher, and even the manufacturer to help optimize the design for mass production. Customers might also be directly involved in beta testing and feedback generation.
In what ways is it important?
Much of the engineering design process, no matter what specific product you want to build, revolves around four major steps: discovery, ideation, development, and optimization. One of the key elements of the entire process is iterative design. The product development team has to repeatedly re-evaluate and refine the prototype until they build a truly optimized solution. They learn from every test result and mistake in every iteration, so they adjust the approach to better suit the goals. Sometimes, and probably more often than not, this iterative loop presents one or two unexpected issues with the design.
This isn’t entirely bad, because you can then ensure the next prototype iteration won’t carry the same surprises. The engineering design process is important to product development in many ways. Everything you do across the steps outlined above contributes to product quality, budget efficiency, and your chances of commercial success after launch. Here are just a few examples of how it can help you set the course for the project.
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Decide which design approach is best
In nearly all cases, a modern-day product development project can be categorized under one of the following three approaches.
| Adaptive design | A great portion of your work in an adaptive design approach will be about creating an adaptation of an existing product. Still remember why the problem exists? And that there have been some attempts to offer a solution, but none have worked quite as well as expected? There are plenty of product categories in which manufacturing and engineering development have practically ceased, leaving you with hardly anything to do but make minor changes to the already-established form. An easy example of such a product is the claw hammer, which has remained essentially the same since the 1920s, maybe even earlier. Seriously, what can you do to improve the design? Maybe you can introduce a new material or a handle with a unique ergonomic shape, but other than those, nothing really. Another example is the modern laptop, with its recognizable clamshell design developed mainly in the 1980s – 1990s. Several decades after the first PowerBook came to market, laptop design hasn’t changed much since. The work is somewhat easy with adaptive design, mostly because you’re using an already-established basic conceptual design and only making changes wherever possible. Changes can be in the form of dimensions, power specifications, and aesthetics. But no matter what modifications you propose, the final product should not look strikingly different from the existing ones. |
| Development design | You also start with an existing idea. However, a development design approach requires you to build a product that’s markedly different from the initial concept. We’re pleased to say that the best examples of such an approach were Nokia phones from the past. Nokia made dozens of mobile phone models, including the bar, flip, leaf-shaped, the slider, the twist, the camcorder look-alike, the gamepad aesthetic, and so on. Underneath, most of those models ran the same operating system, but the shapes were unique enough that you could easily tell them apart from miles away. Another example could be CRT monitors, which have now been replaced by thin plasma or LED screens. Cars can also make the case for development design. The exterior might be all about aesthetics, but powertrain technology has advanced so much that you now have electric and hydrogen-fueled models. Some cars are hybrid, combining internal combustion and electric motors to power the drivetrain. So, development design means you take an existing product and build a distinct variety based on that. This new variety has to have unique characteristics to the point where you can objectively call it “different.” |
| New design | It’s the most difficult design approach of them all. Very few, if any, product developments are actually a new design. It takes some real ingenuity, scientific insight, great foresight, and a good chunk of imagination. Think of the invention of the wheel, the first general-purpose computer, and the Benz Patent-Motorwagen. What do you think is the latest genuinely original physical product design? It’s probably something invented decades ago, maybe centuries even. |
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Every problem can have one or more possible solutions. And there can be different ways to develop the most efficient solution when it comes to product concept design services. For instance, you discover that the typical lawn mowers use blades that need sharpening every 20 hours or so of usage. You can either focus solely on the blade (adaptive design), create a new lawn mower model to accommodate the new blades (development), or build entirely new equipment for cutting grass (new design).
Although all the approaches share the same goals (that is, providing a more user-friendly way to cut grass and maintain a lawn mower), each has a different difficulty level, with “new design” being the most challenging. The best design approach is always the one you feel most comfortable with, both in terms of technical capabilities and budget.
Understand the competitions
Any information you can get about products similar to your idea can play a huge role in how you proceed with product development. This is not to say that you’ll end up copying some design elements. Quite the contrary, you may want to avoid having any resemblance to the competitors for both legal and technical reasons. Some companies include a “patent attorney” in the new product development team for one purpose: making sure that any part of the product idea isn’t a copy of an already patented design. This way, they don’t have to pay royalties to the patent holder.
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From a technical perspective, the information should contain a list of all the available design solutions (to the identified problem you’re trying to solve). There might be one or two competitors selling similar products. Even if your idea isn’t identical to those products, your design may come across as unoriginal. We’re not saying you won’t make a sale for that reason alone because it’s simply untrue. Case in point: smartphones. Every single one of them looks pretty much the same at a glance, and yet millions of people still rush to buy the latest fad every few months.
But that’s more like an exception than the rule, so tread with caution. For a lot of other products, however, knowledge of existing designs will prevent you from pursuing some kind of an imitation of a solution that has been attempted before. It also must have been an ineffective solution; you wouldn’t have discovered the problem in the first place. But why waste time and money making a copy? Making a unique alternative would be a better use of your creativity and resources.
Focus on the “functions”
Anybody would expect that “goals” and “functions” are basically the same, but this isn’t always the case. If the goal of a product development is, for instance, to build a safe stepladder, it only makes sense to say that the ladder in question must work or function safely. While it’s true to a certain degree, the engineering designer can make you understand that there’s a real difference between the two.
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A goal is often stated in a general fashion. It’s the final objective, so no matter what you do in the development work, the end product has to fulfill that very purpose. At the same time, the engineering design process is all about doing experiments with all sorts of design options until you get everything right. The experiments only end when the design meets the objective. But the good thing is that it’s not a freestyle experiment in the sense that you have guardrails and constraints to keep it focused on the main goal.
Function is all about “what the product can do to make it safe” for users. And it turns out there’s a lot it can do. Say the spreaders have a locking mechanism that prevents the rails from snapping together while in use. You can also include anti-slip feet so the stepladder doesn’t move around as easily. A tool tray may seem like an add-on rather than a main feature, but it improves safety by giving users a convenient place to put their hammers and spanners. Perhaps you want to use safety handrails or rear braces for certain designs, too.
Such a technique opens the door to greater creativity, too. Referring back to our previous example of a lawnmower, the goal for a product designer is to make a more user-friendly version of the equipment with less frequent blade sharpening. If you’re stuck with designing new blades and using a peculiar onboard sharpening mechanism, you’ve practically enforced an unnecessary constraint that limits design exploration. Constraints are useful in many cases, but not when the development is still in its early phases. Keep in mind that the main function of a lawn mower is to cut grass.
Would it be possible to use non-metal blades? Does adding a string trimmer attachment make sense? The engineering design process helps you focus on functions that enable the product to meet its objectives. It converts a general statement of goals into a much more specific to-do list. If you have a particularly big team, you can probably even run a simultaneous (as opposed to sequential) design development.
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Avoid disasters
Not every product development effort succeeded. In fact, many of them proved disastrous enough that the makers had to face costly consequences.
- Remember the Concorde? The spectacular crash in 2000 led the authorities to strip the supersonic passenger plane of its airworthiness. Long story short, it’s no longer produced.
- What about the exploding Samsung battery? Manufacturing defects caused many Galaxy Note 7 units to overheat and explode. Samsung was forced to recall the units, causing an estimated revenue loss of US$17 billion.
- Lancia Beta, anyone? The exotic, terminally rust-prone car cost the company a fortune through a buyback program. But even after spending a tremendous sum of money, Lancia never fully recovered from the PR disaster caused by the poorly built model.
Catastrophic failures can happen for many different reasons, however, can be avoided with the help of the right design engineering firm at your side. Failures can happen due to the lack of understanding of the problem, incorrect design requirements, incomplete market research, inadequate testing and evaluation, faulty assembly, manufacturing defects, and so forth. An engineering design process, thanks to its iterative and collaborative nature, should at least minimize the risk of mistakes. This doesn’t suggest in any way that those companies failed to follow their own engineering design process. It’s just that the products were so complex, it’s possible that at some point in the development, somebody didn’t think something through and started a daisy-chain of issues.
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Closing thoughts
An engineering design process is more than just a simple checklist you need to go through in a product development project. It is a checklist, alright, but more importantly, every item on the list keeps you on the right track while giving you the freedom to be just playful enough with your creative engineering side. It’s a systematic problem-solving method used by companies everywhere to decide what to make next and how to build it as efficiently as possible.
There might be some little variations in how different design for manufacturability (DFM) companies handle the process, but for the most part, it’s fundamentally the same. They discover problems, set out to develop a solution, test it, find mistakes, go back to the drawing board, and repeat until they iron out all the details. One of the biggest differences, in fact, lies in those companies’ abilities to put the engineering design process to good use. Some companies do an excellent job at discovering problems and market research, but are terrible at prototyping and optimization. A few have what it takes to take a “new design” approach, while others are experts in adaptive design.
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How Cad Crowd can help
Very rarely is a product development firm perfect in everything, and this is where Cad Crowd comes as a balancing force. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a small 3D design firm trying to break into the market with a new product, an established company looking to bring on board specialists’ perspectives, or anything else in between; you can always count on Cad Crowd to connect you with the best talents to boost your engineering design process. With flexible hiring options, an easy project management dashboard, and a massive network of experienced professionals, it’s safe to say that you can always find qualified engineers and designers on the platform to reinforce your team. Contact us for a quote.
