Dym & Little Summary.
In this chapter, the authors first view engineering design a product of various stakeholders whose input is necessary to come up with a product that meets all quality and design requirements. The stakeholders in this case are the client who requests for the design, the user who will actually use the final product, and the designer himself (the engineer). A key point noted is that these stakeholders may have diverging needs which may affect the overall product design and even result in further complications like financial problems. Dym & Little pint out an example scenario where a conflict of interest might arise using an example of a juice container. On one hand, the designer might consider metal cans but if these cans are squash-able, then they can be hazardous if sharp edges appear after the user squashes it, and this could ruin the client’s reputation if the user complains that the client (juice manufacturer) sold juice in a hazardous can. While the designer can make various trade-offs in terms of material thickness, the overall design choices could pose some unseen safety hazards, and thus the designer is left with ethical problems/dilemmas. Ethical dilemmas often arise because the designer has an obligation to their profession, the general public, and they are also supposed to meet the client and user requirements.
In this chapter, the issue of multidisciplinary design teams is also discussed where members of the design team are sourced from various fields like in biomedical instrumentation design where medics, engineers, social scientists, and legal teams all work together to validate product designs. This only means that the designers have more variables to consider i.e. the clients, users, operating environments, technologies, and the legal framework involved.
Wood & Otto Journeys in Product development: Engineering design Summary.
In this chapter, the authors are keen to differentiate between the concepts of engineering design and product development. On one hand, product development is the set of all activities involved in delivering a product to the market from the product vision, the financials to the overall product. However, Wood & Otto define design as a set of technical activities within the product development process that aim to put the marketing vision and business case visions into a practical product. The authors go on to explore the common methods of product design and redesign where the former case involves creating a new product from scratch and the latter involves improving an already existing product.
The modern product development process described in this chapter focuses on product design and their constituent assemblies. In this case, designers come up with objectively formulated design techniques that are systematically formulated to help them develop products more efficiently. That said, the general takeback from this chapter is that no single design framework and/or process can suit all, and engineers need to develop their own processes to suit their industry and work environments. However, these processes are not perfect and thus designers must strive to improve them via continued design, redesign and reverse engineering. Using this point of view, the modern design processes provide room for learning, experimentation and evolving product design. Using these techniques, it becomes easier for designers to predict how products evolve in various design stages, and how they emerge from simple ideas, to prototypes and finally fully functional products. This perception of engineering design also helps readily visualize alternative methods and ways of executing different design function leading to more efficient and effective product designs.
