Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Illustrated by
BRYAN REID AND CHRISSIE REID
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
KEYWORDS
List of Tables ix
Acknowledgments xi
1What Is Design? 1
1.1 Design: Meeting Needs 3
1.2 Cultural Norms 6
1.3 Why Do We Design? 10
2Engineering Design 13
2.1Engineering Design and the ScientificMethod 16
2.2 An Example of a Successful Design 24
3The Engineering Design Process 27
3.1Design is a Salient Characteristic of Engineering 29
3.2 The Engineering Design Process 29
3.3 Planning: Define the Problem, Scope the Problem, Ideate 34
3.4At this Point, Consider: What about the Processes
that Do Not Include Research? 37
3.5 Comparing Various Design Processes 43
3.6 Terms and Vocabulary 43
3.7The Engineering Design Process Looks
Like the Scientific Method 46
3.8Deciding the Best Design: Using a Decision Matrix 47
4The Product Life Cycle 53
4.1 The Product Life Cycle 54
4.2 Why Be Concerned Beyond Design? 56
4.3Our Product Life Cycle: Conceptualization 57
4.4Introduction 62
4.5Growth 63
4.6Maturity 65
viii Contents
4.7Decline 66
4.8Discontinuance 66
5Constraints and Criteria: A Closer Look 69
5.1Constraints 69
5.2Terminology 74
5.3Criteria 75
5.4 The Best Design 78
6What Is Good Design? 79
6.1 What Makes a Design a Good Design? 79
6.2Dieter Ramss 10 Principles of GoodDesign 84
6.3 Good Design Is Innovative 85
6.4 Good Design Makes a Product Useful 88
6.5 Good Design Is Aesthetic 88
6.6Good Design Makes a Product Understandable 89
6.7 Good Design Is Unobtrusive 90
6.8 Good Design Is Honest 91
6.9 Good Design Is Long Lasting 92
6.10Good Design Is Thorough Down to the Last Detail 94
6.11Good Design Is Environmentally Friendly 95
6.12Good Design Is as Little Design as Possible 97
6.13 An Example: The Wii U Game Console 98
6.14Summary 101
About the Authors 105
Index 107
List of Tables
What Is Design?
If you think good design is expensive, you should look at the cost
of bad design.
Dr. Ralf Speth, Jaguar
We find ourselves surrounded with objects that have been designed for
our use, many of which we consider essential to our daily existence
(although our ancestors would respectfully disagree). So what, exactly,
is design? This is a simple question, but it is one without a simple, direct,
and singular answer.
How does design affect our everyday lives? No longer does human-
ity exist as hunter-gatherers who sleep upon bare ground; we now live
within a designed environment where nearly everything that one encoun-
ters involves aspects of design, with those designs ever changing and ever
evolving.
2 ENGINEERING DESIGN AND THE PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
We wake up on a bed
containing a mattress sup-
ported within a frame.
Two hundred years ago
this might have consisted
of rough-hewn logs with a
thin, feather-filled mattress
resting upon a lattice made
of ropes. Today we have a
variety of mattresses featur-
ing different technology, such as adjustable, memory foam, pillow top,
and support systems (such as spring coils) contained in a manufactured
frame.
Bathing was once done either down by the river or by hauling pails
of well water to fill a tub where each member of the household took his or
her turn. Today one can simply turn on the tap to fill a fiberglass-molded
bathtub with an appropriate mix of cool and heated water.
Elimination of bodily wastes was once performed in an outhouse that
provided privacy over a hole in the ground. We now have devices such as
high-tech Japanese toilets loaded with such attributes as warmed seats, fra-
grance dispensers to cover objectionable odors, bidet services, and warm
air driers. Cleansing is now performed with perforated rolls of extra-soft
toilet paper produced in part from various paper-recycling streams instead
of corn husk or pages torn out from a Sears catalog.
One once dressed for daily activities using clothes cut from a bolt of
cloth and sewn by hand at home, with buttons made from shells or wood
used as fasteners. We now can wear a shirt made in Bangladesh with pants
What Is Design?3
made in Honduras, both manufactured using machines that cut the fabric
and stitch the pieces together, with a multitude of fasteners to choose from,
including plastic buttons, metal zippers, magnetic clasps, and even Velcro.
These clothes are then sent to markets around the world in standardized
containers loaded onboard ships that could easily contain the Nia, Pinta,
and the Santa Mariatypical merchant ships of their erawhile requiring
only a fraction of the crew that Columbus required for his 1492 journey.
Many in the past worked at home on the farm or at a small-scale trade.
Travel was conducted either by foot or on horseback (what pollution con-
trol there was at the time consisted primarily of a shovel); most now travel
to work via some mechanized means of transportation: car, train, bicycle,
even airplanes for some.
Dinner was once made from simple ingredients cooked over an open
fire. Today we can open our refrigerator and take out a beverage stored in a
plastic bottle, and then open our freezer for a frozen microwavable dinner,
both presented in aesthetically pleasing containers. The contents of a can
of vegetables can be placed into a nonstick skillet and cooked on an elec-
tric stove. Afterward, the dirty dishes are loaded into a dishwasher with a
stainless steel door while the bar codes from all of the products consumed
are scanned into our smartphone via a calorie-counting app.
For the evenings entertainment,
mom is sitting in a chair beside a lamp
using an LED-based energy-efficient
light bulb, eReading the latest New York
Times bestseller while listening to her
custom mix of music on an MP3 player.
Dad is in the basement watching a game
streamed from a server on the Internet
while the kids are watching videos or
playing competitive games online with
people potentially from other nations.
Turning back the clock, we would see the lack of electricity limiting ones
ability to do much of anything other than sleepperhaps reading by can-
dlelight, or listening to a family member playing a bellows-operated reed
organ with the sheet music illuminated by oil-filled lamps.
Self-actualization
Esteem
Love/belonging
Safety
Physiological
Walked 1 mile
badge earned
needs; mainly, the desires to know and to understand. The use of movable
type with a printing press, developed by Gutenberg around 1439, ush-
ered in an information revolution, first through the greater dissemination
of static information through books, and later through the dissemination
of ephemeral, time-sensitive information through broadsheets and then
newspapers.
It should be pointed out that Maslow posited that the aforementioned
five sets of needs are not construed to be in a step-wise, all-or-none rela-
tionship; that is, the concept that a particular need (or set of needs) must be
100 percent satisfied before the next need (or set of needs) emerges is not
the case. Needs are met via degrees of relative satisfaction, where a realistic
accounting of how ones needs are being met would be in terms of decreas-
ing percentages of satisfaction as one ascends the hierarchical levels. In his
paper, Maslow presents a hypothetical example where the average citizen
is 85 percent satisfied in his physiological needs, 70percent in his safety
needs, 50 percent in his love needs, 40 percent in his self-esteem needs, and
10 percent in his self-actualization needs. Furthermore, Maslow contended
that the emergence of new needs occurs gradually, by slow degrees from
nothingness. For example, given the prepotent need N1 and a subsequent
need N2, if need N1 is satisfied only 20 percent, then N2 may not even be
visible; however, as the satisfaction of N1 increasessay, to 40percent
need N2 emerges and begins to be met, albeit at a lower levelsay, at only
5 percentthan its prepotent need.
As Maslow concluded in his paper, man is a perpetually wanting ani-
mal. Therefore, one possible answer to the question of what is design?
is that design is an attempt to meet human needs. However, there are
other aspects that affect human motivation, such as personal desires based
on perceived instead of actual needs, cultural norms, and conditioned
behaviors, that often must be accounted for in design. For example, one
purpose of advertising is to convince the consumer that the company has
a solution to a problemit does not matter if that problem is real, or is
manufactured to be more than it may be. Accordingly, one might be moti-
vated to buy a particular product because of an advertising appeal to their
esteem needs, having been convinced that they will now fit in by their
use of the product.
To generate unrest, native leaders spread the rumor that the lubricant
was actually a mixture of beef and hog tallow. Such rumors were tar-
geted to affect the taboos held both by Hindus, to whom cattle are sacred,
and by Muslims, to whom pigs are highly unclean. For members of either
religion, the act of placing the cartridge to the mouth and biting it open
constituted an act of self-defilement. While assurances were provided by
the British governor general that the cartridges were sealed only with a
combination of mutton fat and beeswax, the risk of committing a taboo
act based on trusting the word of an occupier was too much to bear. The
subsequent dissension within the Sepoy ranks was one of the triggers for
the 18571858 Sepoy Mutiny through northern India. The consequences
of this mutiny included the deaths of thousands, as well as the even-
tual dissolution of the East India Company. There was a solution that, if
adopted, would have steered far away from such cultural taboos. Samuel
Colt designed a ramrod for the 1853 Enfield that incorporated an oiler
reservoir, thereby allowing the use of dry cartridges similar to those used
by the Sepoys for their smoothbore muskets. Although the design could
be completely sensible from a process point of view, the public can form
a variety of opinions once it enters the market; this may render the design
infeasible as a solution to the problem.
It is also a possibility that a design
incorporates the use of positive or
negative sanctions for social control,
which are methods adopted to encour-
age people to observe norms. Posi-
tive sanctions serve to encourage the
continuance of appropriate behaviors
whereas the intent of negative sanc-
tions is to discourage the continuance
of disapproved behaviors. For exam-
ple, in the United States a commonly violated folkway involves chil-
dren not brushing their teeth before going to bed. While many folkways
involve interpersonal behavior, encouraging children to engage in appro-
priate dental hygiene activities prior to bedtime is something that can be
incorporated into a design. One such design solution is a toothbrush that
provides two minutes of music transmitted solely via vibrations in the
toothbrush head to the teeth and to the head. By having musical selections
of that length, children are encouraged to not only brush their teeth, but
to do so for what is considered a sufficient amount of time to be effective.
Laws are being increasingly enforced through design. The design of
traffic enforcement cameras for detecting red-light or speeding violations
What Is Design?9
With self-driving cars, what will become of a phrase like get behind
the wheel? The phrase may live on with a societal understanding of
its meaning, much like roll down a window or hang up the phone.
Another issue involves the use of touch screen for character input. For
the 2013 Hyundai Sonata Limited owned by one of the authors, entering
street addresses into the onboard navigation system was disconcerting,
as the software keys were presented in alphabetical order instead of the
traditional QWERTY ordering; thankfully, one could go into the settings
and select the QWERTY key layout. Why QWERTY? The person credited
with the development of the first mass-produced typewriter, Christopher
Sholes, created the QWERTY layout for the 1878 Remington Standard
2 for one or both of the following reasons. The apocryphal story is that
this design was implemented to deliberately slow typists down so that
the hammers containing the type elements would not jam and possibly
break. However, another reason posited is that it was a deliberate attempt
to develop a proprietary layout that would require operators to undergo
trainingfor a modest fee. Such an investment would also help to rein-
force brand loyalty, resulting in greater sales over the long run.
10 ENGINEERING DESIGN AND THE PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE
So what is design? Lets return to the quotes that began this chapter. Don
Norman stated that design is the practice of intentional creation to
enhance the world. Unfortunately, many similar definitions for design
end here; however, Norman goes on to explain that design is a field of
doing and making, creating great products and services that fit human
needs, that delight and inform. In many ways, this is the key element
in trying to understand the concept of design in general, and engineering
design in particular. Many students contemplate entering the engineering
profession with the desire to design the longest bridge, the fastest car, or
the thinnest smart phone. However, without understanding that the design
of such products involves human needs, being enamored of the coolness
of the technology employed can often serve as blinders, thereby prevent-
ing the designers from seeing the actual needs, motivations, and desires of
those for whom they are designing the product.
Norman said that design calls upon the arts and humanities, the
social, physical, and biological sciences, engineering and business.
Anyone can design a product; good design involves making a product
both useful and understandable, which encompasses the human condition.
Accordingly, to become good at design, one must become at least familiar
with the various aspects of the human condition as experienced through
the study of fine arts and humanities. Products interact with people at sev-
eral levels; therefore, designers require at least an understanding of the
pertinent concepts emanating from the social, physical, and biological sci-
ences. Products, once designed, need to be manufactured and marketed;
designers must understand the critical roles that both engineering and
business play in getting a design out into the marketplace and accepted by
consumers. To be good designers, engineering students require a broad-
based education, grounded not only in STEM-related topics (science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics), but also in the liberal arts
and in business. This, therefore, is the underlying rationale for engineer-
ing majors to take general education courses, and is best expressed by
the following quote from Dieter Rams, the famed head of design for the
German company Braun: You cannot understand design if you do not
understand people; design is made for people.
What Is Design?11
BIBLIOGRAPHY
G M
Gasoline-powered car, 15 Manufacturability constraints, 72
Good design Manufacturing process for
aesthetics, 8889 electronics
affordances, 82 circuit board, 5960
Apple products, 97 customer specifications, 60
conceptual model, 82 surface-mount resistor, 59
constraints, 8384 through-hole resistor, 59
crucial detail lacking, 9495 Mappings, 83
Dieter Ramss principles, 8485 Maslows hierarchy of needs
discoverability, 81 esteem, 5
environmentally friendly, 9597 physiological needs, 45
110 Index