Like the Scientific Method, there is no single, set-in-stone, "official" Engineering Design Process. Some people call it a Design Process and some call it a Design Cycle. Either way, the essential steps can be boiled down to as few as 3 or expanded to 12 or more! Check out the Slideshow below to get a taste of some of the many different versions:
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As you can see to, almost all versions of the Engineering Design Process have a few key things in common. An engineer must...
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Iterative Design
To reiterate means to repeat over and over again, and iterations are the repeated versions of things. For example,
whenever Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, that's a new iteration of their previous operating system...
whenever Microsoft releases a new version of Windows, that's a new iteration of their previous operating system...
Whenever Apple releases a new version of the iPhone, each of those are successive iterations...
The goal of reiterative design is optimization - making the absolute best product design or solution possible. But what does being "best" actually mean?
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...What qualifies as "best" will often vary with the circumstances. It takes a good understanding of your objective to know if your product is performing satisfactorily or not.
Frequently in engineering, optimizing for one thing involves a trade-off for another. You can't always get what you want, and you can't usually have your cake and eat it too. In other words, sacrifices in one area may be necessary for improvement in another. Engineers often look for the optimal balance between different features. For instance... A super-fast sports car is probably not going to be the safest, nor the cheapest, nor the most environmentally friendly. But making the car "greener" might mean sacrificing its speed. Making it safer might mean adding weight, making it slower. Filling the car with the latest high-tech gear might make it cutting-edge and "smart," but also more expensive (and possibly more prone to computer glitches and bugs). Often times, a cost-benefit analysis is necessary to determine whether certain features or modifications are worth it. Finally, field testing subjects the prototype design to real-world conditions and stresses to see how it performs. |
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