Design
Engineering - How Ideas Become Products |
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| Perceptions of design engineering
vary greatly in the aerospace industry, varying from "design drafting" to
"coordinated control over the product, from the conceptual phase to the finished
product." The introduction of Concurrent Engineering(CE), or Integrated Product
Development(IPD) emphasizes the importance of design engineers as a focal point for a
myriad of inputs from the engineering, development, and production areas in order to
produce a high quality, cost effective, competitive product. Design engineering is fundamental to every project. It is a discipline that creates and transforms ideas and concepts into a product definition that satisfies customer requirements. The role of the design engineer is the creation, synthesis, iteration, and presentation of design solutions. The design engineer coordinates with engineering specialists and integrates their inputs to produce the form, fit and function documentation to completely define the product. Simply stated, in the integrated product development process, the design engineer interacts with the customer, the project manager, the systems integration personnel, and the production team. Interactions and communications result in the specialty engineering inputs, processes and capabilities concerns, test and evaluation implications, production inputs, and, of course, cost and schedule impacts. All of these inputs affect conceptual tradeoffs, and final depiction of the design of the product. The design engineer must be able to identify the critical requirements form the multiple, even conflicting constraints of the initial request in order to create appropriate functional concepts. The design engineer must conceive of many different ways to fulfill the requirements. Several conceptual solutions are required to evaluate and select the "best" one. The ability to synthesize design concepts and present and explain them to others is a crucial skill for design engineers. The design engineer integrates the many specialty disciplines of the "engineering domain" that are required for the evaluation and selection of the options and design trades that are part of the new product performance iteration process. Satisfactory products are developed when the design engineer successfully integrates, by analysis and documentation, the feasible capabilities so that all requirements are met, including manufacturability, quality assurance, product safety, reliability maintainability and human engineering. Schedule and cost goals must also be met for both the design process and the resulting product. When used, the product will be judged and must perform on its own merits. |
Design Engineering is a Multi-phaseed Iterative Process The ultimate responsibility for the delivery of a well designed and properly functioning product rests with the design engineer. Design engineering seeks an optimal whole, rather than attempting to perfect each individual part within a system, thus obtaining a balanced product that fulfills the requirements ad satisfies the customer. The design engineering process is an iterative one. Iteration is necessary during each phase of the design process in order to coordinate and improve upon previous decisions, designs, and functions. Ideally, these iterations must be kept to a minimum .. hence, the IPD process. However, some modifications after major reviews, or verification testing during the program are not unusual, and are coordinated through the design engineer. As shown in the figure above, the chronological events in the design process lead the design engineer from analyzing requirements and determining feasibility, all the way through supporting the product disposal when that event becomes necessary. It is easy to see that iterations in the design could occur in many of the tasks shown. In essence, design engineering is the creative process in which the ideas of one or more contributors are converted from ideas to documents that define a product that can be manufactured by a company to earn a profit. |
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