Engineering design is the process of creating systems or components to meet specific needs, emphasizing creativity and imagination alongside technical skills. The design process involves systematic steps, crucially starting with identifying customer needs and includes various stages from conceptualization to detailed design. Failures in design often stem from poor understanding, incorrect specifications, or inadequate user adoption, highlighting the importance of thorough research and customer engagement.

1. INTRODUCTION TO
ENGINEERING DESIGN

2. Definition
 Engineering Design is the process of devising a
system, component, or process to meet desired
needs.
 “Imagination is more important than knowledge, for
knowledge is finite whereas imagination is infinite” ~
Albert Einstein

3. Design Levels
 Adaptive design
 adaptation of existing designs.
 Development design
 The designer starts from an existing design, but the final
outcome may differ markedly from the initial product
 New design
 generating a new concept
 involves mastering all the previous skills in addition to
creativity and imagination, insight, and foresight.

4. Importance of Design
 Design does not start with an engineering drawing
made on a computer package such as AutoCAD™.
 Design is most important steps in the development
of a product
 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.

5. Case Studies of Poor Design

6. Reasons for Engineering Design Failures – Walton
List
 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

7. Other types of Design Failure
 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?
 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.

8. Systematic Design
 It was introduced to help guide the design process
 Requirements
 Product concept
 Solution concept
 Embodiment design
 Detailed design

9. Most Important Step – Needs and Customer
Identification
 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.

10. Example – Customers of an Airplane
 • 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

11. A Brief Overview of the Design Process
 Need Identification and Problem Definition
 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.
 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.
 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.
 Customer complaints
 Complaints from customers provide a significant premise to identify the requisite
improvement for an existing product.

12. A Brief Overview of the Design Process
 Conceptual Design
 Identification of customer needs:
 Problem definition:
 Gathering Information:
 Conceptualization:
 Concept selection

13.  Embodiment Design
 Product architecture: It is concerned with dividing the overall
design system into small subsystems and modules
 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.
 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.