There are no hard and fast rules for achieving success in design, but there are principles of good practice. Here are some of my feelings on the subject, some thoughts and observations ranging from A to Z:
Aesthetics. How something looks is always important. This does not mean that it has to be a work of art, just that it should look appropriate to its function.
Bugs. It is always better to assume that a design contains a bug than to believe that it does not. A designer should never check a design without having a supply of insecticide handy.
Constraints. There should always be strings attached to a design idea; they keep it from floating off into irrelevance.
Design. This is the most creative and most fundamental aspect of engineering. Other engineering activities, including engineering science, should be in service to design.
Economics. The self-made American engineer Arthur M. Wellington (1847-1895), in his book on the economic theory of the location of railways, defined engineering as "the art of doing well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion."
Failure. This thing that designers want most to avoid should always be first and foremost in their mind. Otherwise, how could they design against it?
Glass Part Full. It has been said that engineers view a partly filled glass neither as optimists nor as pessimists: They simply see the glass as improperly designed.
The comparison between over-design and over-eating is appropriate. There are hundreds of wristwatches, mobile phones and even PCs that are larded with extra features and software that seem to serve little purpose other than to cause unnecessary complexity. Someone needs to offer a class, "Slim Fast Product Design 101."
This slimming down the design has been a slow process for me to get a handle on. I will still at times go for a beefy look just because I want that look and not because the added strength or weight is important to the final function.
"Failure. This thing that designers want most to avoid should always be first and foremost in their mind. Otherwise, how could they design against it?"
I will allow that this includes 'Failure to design saftey in first'... Always at the top of my list.
Not long ago, I judged a student engineering project at my alma matter. One team of students had the task of coming up with a solution to a manufacturing problem. (This was a "real world" project sponsored by a local company). The solution they ultimately came up with, I thought, was a pretty good one.
Prior to hitting upon this solution, they came up with a number of other interesting ideas; however, these ideas were unworkable within the constraints of the manufacturing process.
When I asked the students about some of these rejected ideas, their response was basically, "Well, it was a good idea, but the company didn't like it for some reason, so we had to come up with something else." They didn't seem to be willing or able to think critically about the constraints of the process - or why something which might otherwise be a brilliant idea might not work in a given context.
Given that being able to think intelligently about the constraints of a system is one of the most important outcomes of an engineering education, I graded the students down for this.
(For what it's worth, they won the competition anyway).
Just as really attractive people are able to usually get the benefit of doubt, so too do attractive devices have the user trying to look for what is right rather than what is wrong. Should not be the case, but it is.
Although sketches are useful, it is perilous to begin a design with sketches before having created a full list of all the technical requirement Specifications. A design cannot be great unless it is Specified, Tested and validated against those Specs. I would classify sketches under I for Imagination or R for Realization.
Reality is always at the very top of my list. It includes so many of the other items as representing aspects of the real world of engineering and design. Economics (costs and cost/benefit ratio), legal concerns, constraints of all kinds, recognition of the limits of models and simulations, market considerations, and so forth. Dreaming is a starting point; implementation is where the rubber hits the road, and that will succeed only with an approach recognizing all of these real-world aspects. This is one of the greatest shortcomings of engineering education today: students are not taught about the real world (neglect of so many fundamentals, especially physics and related areas like thermodynamics).
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New disc magnet motors fit into the design trend of stepping up to closed loop performance while maintaining the cost advantage of stepper motor technology.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
A new battery design, which replaces lithium with abundant and low-cost elemental sulfur, is still in its nascent stages but shows real promise for giving batteries more energy potential.
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