AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGINEERING DESIGN

Definition

Engineering Design is the process of devising a system, component, or process to meet

desired needs. It is a decision-making process (often iterative), in which the basic
sciences, mathematics, and engineering sciences are applied to optimally convert
resources to meet a stated objective. Among the fundamental elements of the design
process is the establishment of objectives and criteria, synthesis, analysis, construction,
testing, and evaluation.

In designing, consideration should be given to a variety of realistic constraints, such as

economic factors, safety, reliability, aesthetics, ethics, and social impact….etc. Thus the
product of the design process should operate within the key specified constraints.

Design Levels
As in any field of human activity, there are different degrees of difficulty. In design,
these stages are adaptive design, developed design, and new design.

 Adaptive design: In the great majority of instances, the designer’s work will be
concerned with the adaptation of existing designs. There are branches of
manufacturing in which development has practically ceased, so that there is hardly
anything left for the designer to do except make minor modifications, usually in the
dimensions of the product. Design activity of this kind demands no special
knowledge or skill, and the problems presented are easily solved by a designer with
ordinary technical training. One such example can be the elevator, which has
remained the same technically and conceptually for some time now. Another
example is a washing machine. This has been based on the same conceptual design
for the last several years and varies in only a few parameters, such as its dimensions,
materials, and detailed power specifications.

 Development design: Considerably more scientific training and design ability are
needed for development design. The designer starts from an existing design, but the
final outcome may differ markedly from the initial product. Examples of this
 development could be from a manual gearbox in a car to an automatic one and from
the traditional tube-based television to the modern plasma and LCD versions.

 New design: Only a small number of designs are new designs. This is possibly the
most difficult level in that generating a new concept involves mastering all the
previous skills in addition to creativity and imagination, insight, and foresight.
Examples of this are the design of the first automobile, airplane, or even the wheel (a
long time ago). Try to think of entirely new designs which have been introduced
over the last decade.

Importance of Design

“Imagination is more important than knowledge, for knowledge is finite whereas imagination is
infinite” ~ Albert Einstein

From the definition in the previous section, it is evident that design is both a scientific
and a creative process.
It is essential to realize that design does not start with an engineering drawing made on
a computer package such as AutoCAD™. Such a final engineering drawing can be
regarded in some ways as the ‘lab report’ of your final design and hence a method of
communicating your design with other people. There are many steps before this. Of
course, as computer packages become more advanced, designers are able to start using
them earlier on in the design process to aid them with their design. However, as design
is a creative process, most of the input will have to come from the designer.

Design is widely regarded as one of the most important steps in the development of a
product. Indeed, without a design, there would be no product! Not only this, but no
matter how good the manufacturing, production, sales, etc. are, if a product is poorly
designed, the end product still will be a bad idea and will ultimately fail, as no one likes
to purchase a bad idea.

Most consumers will not be aware or even interested in the detailed technical
specifications of a product or how efficient the manufacturing process. The first thing
that a consumer will usually look at before deciding to purchase something is its design
and ‘how it looks’. This will be followed by the reliability and quality of the item, then
by the price. Think about how people choose to buy a mobile phone. It is interesting to
note here that price does not always come first. Many people are willing to pay a bit
more if they see the benefits, and this is usually reflected in the design. In some cases,
people will only purchase an item if it is expensive for reassurance of quality
and possibly prestige (no one would buy an iphone because it was cheap!).

However, in most cases, part of the design process will be to design for minimum cost
so that a product can be competitive in the marketplace.
Investing money and resources at the design stage yields the biggest return on
investment of a product. One of the reasons for this is that changes can be made easily
at this early stage, whereas later on, changes in the manufacturing methods and so on
could be extremely costly—both in time and money.

Throughout history, humans have been successfully designing artifacts to satisfy the
needs of civilization. History is full of great designs and inventions. Not all that
engineers build has become successful; occasionally, catastrophic failures occur. A few
of the well-publicized disasters associated with engineering systems are as follows:
Reasons of Failure for Most Engineering Designs
Most of the engineering failures can be attributed to the following reasons;
• Incorrect or overextended assumptions
• Poor understanding of the problem to be solved
• Incorrect design specifications
• Faulty manufacturing and assembly
• Error in design calculations
• Incomplete experimentation and inadequate data collection
• Errors in drawings
• Faulty reasoning from good assumptions

As can be seen, all of the disaster examples given and the reasons for their catastrophic
failures can be summarized and categorized within one or more of the items on the lists
above, referred to as the Walton List.
However, even if a design is a technical success and no faults occur, many designs still
fail to achieve their desired goals, and many achieve them but are not adopted by the
users. So why do many people fail at design? One of the answers is that design is
inherently difficult and a major challenge. Designers not only have to have the creative
and technical skills to develop an idea to become a reality, but they also need to predict
the future in some ways.
They need to predict each step of the product’s life from visualization to realization and
finally to the end of its life cycle and how it will be disposed of and/or recycled. This
means that a designer needs to develop a product that sponsors will like and fund (and
so on and so forth) all the way down to the distributors, vendors, users, operators, and
society as a whole.

It is for these reasons that the systematic design process was introduced to help guide
the designer to achieve his/her goals without hindering creativity.

Introduction to Systematic Design

The design process was formalized to enable both students and professional designers
to follow a systematic approach to design and help them guide their creativity and
technical problem-solving skills to a satisfactory end.
There are various forms of the systematic design process, and different people list as
few as four steps to as many as nine. Essentially though, they all revolve around the
same following basic principles:
• Requirements
• Product concept
• Solution concept
• Embodiment design
• Detailed design

The most important step of the design process is identifying the needs of the customer
or the ‘Requirements’ stage. However, before this is done, it is important to establish
who the customers are. A vital concept to grasp here is that customers are not only the
end users. Customers of a product are everyone who will deal with the product at some
stage during its lifetime. For example, the person who will sell the product is also a
customer. A designer must make the product attractive for the seller to agree to
advertise and market it. Another example of a customer is the person who will service
and maintain the product during its lifetime in operation. If a product is difficult to
maintain and/or service, independent service providers will be keen to recommend
other products or charge more to service the item. And so on. Let us take a look at
possible customers of an airplane. These can include:
• Passengers
• Crew
• Pilot
• Airport
• Engineers and service crew
• Fueling companies
• Airlines
• Manufacturing and production departments
• Baggage handlers
• Cleaning and catering companies
• Sales and marketing
• Accounts and finance departments
• Military/Courier/Cargo/etc
• Authorities and official bodies
• Companies involved with the items that will be outsourced

Each of these customers has entirely different (and sometimes conflicting) needs for the
same product, and by identifying these customers first, it is then possible to identify all
the needs and arrive at a reasonable compromise according to priority and feasibility.
Most of the time the customer provides a generic statement of need, and it is up to the
engineer to identify the specific needs of the customer. For example, we are required to
design a chair that can be used by a child. Clearly, all of us know how to sit on a chair,
so in that perspective, we know how a chair works. A chair is used for sitting.
Unfortunately, this description does not say how the chair is made. What material is
used? Is the chair flexible or rigid? Does the chair rotate or is it fixed? What does it
mean that the chair is to be used by a child? Is safety the biggest concern? How much
will the chair cost? How old is the child? And so on.
Many factors in engineering design are not based on a mathematical model, but the
engineering design process is maintained to be systematic. In the previous example, we
can use Newton’s laws of equilibrium to describe the forces generated in the chair’s
legs. We can also describe the deformation of the legs when a person sits down. We can
even use finite element analysis to estimate the stresses in the legs, the seat, and the
back. We can also describe the manufacturing process and the joints used in the chair.
Some of these factors can be represented using mathematical models, but what
mathematical model will describe the color of the chair, and what mathematical model
will measure if the chair is safe for use by a child? The function of the chair cannot be
completely presented by a mathematical model. These functions are manipulated by
reasoning. In the designing process, mathematical modeling, although important, is not
sufficient to design the artifact.

DESIGN PROCESS

The design process is a sequence of events and a set of guidelines that helps define a
clear starting point that takes the designer from visualizing a product in his/her
imagination to realizing it in real life in a systematic manner—without hindering their
creative process.
Earlier we summarized the principle steps of a systematic design process and
mentioned that various people have slightly different forms of representing such a
process. We now describe a typical representation these different steps in more detail.
The steps in this representation are;
a) Conceptual Design
b) Embodiment Design
c) Detailed Design
They are related to each other as shown in the figure below;
Conceptual Design
It is a process in which we initiate the design and come up with a number of design
concepts and then narrow down to the single best concept. This involved the following
steps.
1. Identification of customer needs: The mail objective of this is to completely understand
the customers’ needs and to communicate them to the design team
2. Problem definition: The mail goal of this activity is to create a statement that describes
what all needs to be accomplished to meet the needs of the customers’ requirements.
3. Gathering Information: In this step, we collect all the information that can be helpful
for developing and translating the customers’ needs into engineering design.
4. Conceptualization: In this step, broad sets of concepts are generated that can
potentially satisfy the problem statement.
5. Concept selection: The main objective of this step is to evaluate the various design
concepts, modifying and evolving into a single preferred concept.

Embodiment Design
It is a process where the structured development of the design concepts takes place. It is
in this phase that decisions are made on strength, material selection, size shape and
spatial compatibility. Embodiment design is concerned with three major tasks – product
architecture, configuration design, and parametric design.
1. Product architecture: It is concerned with dividing the overall design system into
small subsystems and modules. It is in this step we decide how the physical
components of the design are to be arranged in order to combine them to carry out
the functional duties of the design.
2. Configuration design: In this process we determine what all features are required in
the various parts / components and how these features are to be arranged in space
relative to each other.
3. Parametric design: It starts with information from the configuration design process
and aims to establish the exact dimensions and tolerances of the product. Also, final
decisions on the material and manufacturing processes are done if it has not been
fixed in the previous process. One of the important aspects of parametric designs is
to examine if the design is robust or not.

Detail Design
It is in this phase the design is brought to a state where it has the complete engineering
description of a tested and a producible product. Any missing information about the
arrangement, form, material, manufacturing process, dimensions, tolerances etc of each
part is added and detailed engineering drawing suitable for manufacturing are
prepared.

A Detailed Review of the Critical Design Process Steps

Need Identification and Problem Definition
Out of all the steps in the engineering design process, the definition of the problem is by
far the most important step. A complete and thorough understanding the problem is
prerequisite in achieving the targeted solution. For example, the ultimate test of a
product is how well it sells. However, it is first essential to understand and provide
what a customer wants in the product which can only be achieved by defining the
problem precisely at the first place.

A-priori Activities
In majority of the situations, a significant amount of development work precedes the
tight definition of a design problem. These a-priori development works can generally be
referred to planning. The primary purpose of the planning stages is to collect all the
necessary information and to decide, for example, whether manufacturing a new
product is feasible or what would be the best time to market a new or modified
product, or whether a specific company has the adequate resource to manufacture a
new product. Usually the initial design projects can be categorized as follows.
a) Variation of an existing product
This includes minor changes in few parameters of an existing the product e.g.
change in the power of a motor or change in the design of a typical clamping
bracket, and so on.
b) Improvement in an existing product
This involves major redesign of an existing product primarily to improve
performance and quality, update features (may be due to competitions), reduce cost in
manufacturing and so on.
c) Development of a new product for a low-volume production run
This is primarily referred to new parts or products that would possibly be
manufactured in smaller number of units (e.g. < 10000). In many cases, a large
manufacturing unit may wish to buy standard available components available from
smaller manufacturing units rather than actually making the same to avoid
additional costs.
d) Development of a new product for mass production
These include products or parts which need to be produced in large volumes e.g. in
the category of automobiles, home appliance etc. Such design projects provide the
design engineer the flexibility in selecting appropriate material and manufacturing
process through careful planning.
e) One-of-a-kind design
Such projects can vary from a simple, quick design requiring minimum of analysis
like designing of a welding fixture to hold parts to large exclusive projects such as
building of a 200-MW steam turbine.

Identifying Customer Needs

It is usually the desire of the customers that drive the development of a new product or
modification of an existing product. It is thus critical to collate the need or views of the
customers when starting a design project. The needs of the customers can be gathered
through multiple routes.
a) Interviewing with customers
An active team should constantly meet current and potential customers to identify
the strength and weakness of a product so as to examine if there is any need to
upgrade.
b) Focus group
A focus group refers to a small sub-set of existing customers or potential customers.
A discussion is usually facilitated in many such groups separately to identify more
closely the merits and demerits of the product.
c) Customer survey
A written questionnaire is possibly the best way to know the pubic opinions for
redesigning an existing product or developing a new product.
d) Customer complaints
Complaints from customers provide a significant premise to identify the requisite
improvement for an existing product.

Evaluating Customer Needs

The responses of the customer should be evaluated on a relative scale, say using a scale
from 1 (low importance) to 5 (high importance). Those responses with high average score
should be given a greater priority when redesigning an existing product or designing a
new product. It is very essential to divide the customer needs into two groups: hard
constraints that should be satisfied (must) and softer needs that can be traded off
against other customer needs (wants). Customer needs can best be identified from face
to face interview, from a focus group survey or from the higher-ranking items in the
written survey.

Customer requirements
Customer requirements must be characterized on the basis of performance, time, cost and
quality. The performance would refer to the specific or intended function of a product.
The time would include all the time aspects that would be involved in the design. A
proper design should be able to reduce the cycle time to market a new product. The cost
includes all the monetary aspects of the design and hence, quite crucial. The cost aspect
also determines the buying decisions of any product by the customers. The quality is a
complex characteristic with many aspects and definitions and can best be defined as the
totality of features and characteristic of a product that bears on its ability to satisfy its
stated needs. Another important aspect of the customers requirements is the value of a
product that can be envisaged as the ratio of the function (or the quality) provided and
the cost. For example, the quality of a manufactured product can be envisaged from the
following eight basic dimensions.

The dimensions of performance, features and conformance are often interrelated. We

therefore need to recognize that there are four levels of customer requirements as
a) Expectations that refer to the basic attributes, which one would expect to be present
in the product as standard features,
b) Spokens that refer to the specific features, which the customer would say and want as
a feature in the product.
c) Unspokens that refer to the attributes of a product that the customers would not
generally ask for but are still important and hence, cannot be ignored.
d) Exciters which are also known as delighters and are features that make the product
unique and distinguish the same from their competitors.
These requirements must be satisfied at each level before we move and address those at
the next level. Not all customer requirements are equal and hence it becomes very
essential to identify these requirements which are important and ensure that they are
delivered in the product. To do this one must adopt a strategy for actively seeking the
‘the voice of the customer’.

Tools: Quality Function Deployment

Though QFD finds use in several other aspects of the manufacturing process, it can be
used to accurately transform the voice of the customer into engineering characteristics,
while factoring other real world constraints. It is a graphical technique, which
systematically looks at all the elements that are deemed important based on customers
survey go into the production definitions. A sample layout of the QFD diagram is
shown below.

Read more about the applications of QFD.

Product Design Specifications
The product design specification is the basic control and reference document that would
include the outcomes of the product development exercise, and is the must to begin
with and execute the design and manufacturing of any specific part or product. The
quality function deployment tool provides the most crucial inputs in writing the product
design specifications. Following are some of the important elements of a typical product
design specification document. (It need not contain ALL of the elements, this is a
guideline)

In-use purposes and market requirements

a) Title and Purpose or function of the product,
b) Predictable unintended use of the product,
c) Special features of the product,
d) What would be the competitive products?
e) What is the intended market and why there is a need for this product?
f) Relationship of the product to the other company products,
g) Anticipated market demand (units per year) and target price.

Functional Requirements
a) Functional performances such as flow of energy, information, materials, operational
steps, efficiency, accuracy, etc.,
b) Physical requirements such as shape, size, weight, surface finish, etc.,
c) Service environment such as storage and transportation requirement,
d) Life-cycle issues including useful life, reliability (mean time to failure), robustness,
ease of installation, maintenance and repair, recyclability, etc.
e) Human factors including importance of aesthetics, ergonomics and user-training.

Corporate Constraints
a) Is there adequate time to design a quality product and its manufacturing process
(time to market)
b) What are the requirements for manufacturing this product?
c) Do existing relationships with the suppliers pose any constraint on manufacturing?
d) Are there any constraints in using the trademark, logo, brand name?
e) What are the profitability and return on investment (ROI) that must be met?
Social and Legal Requirements
a) The product design specification should meet / contain all the requisite safety and
environmental regulations,
b) The product design specification should contain all the required standards,
c) The product design specification must be completed with respect to all safety and
liability norms,
d) The product design specification should consider all the information related to the
patents and intellectual property that are applicable.

Below is an example of Product Design Specifications for a wheelchair. Two criteria are
given….as an example.