The Engineering Journey - Part 5: Translating Ambition into Action: The Blueprint for a Successful Idea

The Road from “Want” to “What”

The design journey, as we have established, is a systematic methodology for solving problems, leading to a quality product. Yet, the ultimate success of any design often hinges on overcoming a fundamental challenge: the translation of subjective, often vague, human desires into objective, measurable technical specifications. A customer might say they want a backpack that is “lightweight” and “durable,” but an engineer needs to know: “How much is lightweight?” and “How many years is durable?”

The design process must be structured to extract these precise metrics from the initial ambiguity, or the project risks becoming an expensive guessing game. The early steps of the design journey—establishing the need, project planning, and defining requirements—are dedicated entirely to this critical conversion.

The journey begins with identifying a societal need and formulating it into measurable terms, a task Albert Einstein considered far more essential than the solution itself, as it requires the creative imagination that marks real advances in science. A successful design process aims to minimize the number of iterations required to achieve a quality product that is easy to assemble, durable, and meets all performance criteria, thereby reducing cost and resource commitment.

The product design process involves five distinct phases:

1. Establish Need: Identify customers, stakeholders, and the underlying necessity (market, technology, sustainability).
2. Gather Requirements: Define objectives and constraints (time, budget, ethics).
3. Conceptual Design: Generate, analyze, and evaluate candidate concepts.
4. Detail Design: Perform detailed analysis and refine product specifics.
5. Release to Production: Finalize manufacturing, quality control, and lifecycle planning.

This post will focus on the first three phases, which lay the definitive foundation for innovation.

I. Defining the Mission: The Design Need and Information Gathering

The design need is the starting point of the entire journey. It is usually not identified by the designer but may be driven by market demand, new technology, military regulations, business strategy, or sustainability concerns. For instance, the automobile industry is currently developing hybrid and electric cars due to consumer demand for better gas mileage and eco-friendly attributes.

Identifying this need involves looking through several strategic lenses:

• Market Research: Examining demographics (who buys? who uses?), socioeconomic factors, aesthetics, and applicable technologies.
• Existing Designs: Reverse engineering the competition from the perspective of aesthetics, material selection, manufacturing processes, and functional performance.
• End Users: Observing physical interaction with existing products and understanding psychological aspects and potential misuse.
• Human Factors: Ensuring ergonomics and intuition facilitate use, including tactile feedback and the user interface.
• Design Integration: Confirming that mechanical, electrical, materials, and manufacturing requirements are blended in an interdisciplinary fashion.

Since most design problems are open-ended and often not well defined, the goal is to identify the missing information and find the best solution with minimal resources.

The Three Methods for Insight

To gather the information necessary to determine customer and stakeholder requirements, engineers commonly use three primary methods:

1. Observations: This involves watching customers use existing products to identify refinements or the need for a completely new design. This is particularly effective because most new products are often refinements of existing ones.
2. Surveys: This method uses carefully designed questionnaires (administered via mail, telephone, or in-person) to gather specific information or opinions on a well-defined subject. Surveys are well-suited for collecting requirements for products that will be redesigned or for new, but well-understood, product domains.
3. Focus Groups: This technique involves carefully sampled groups of potential customers. It is best suited for generating original products or gathering specialized customer views on product improvements.

Once the initial need is defined, the team develops a design brief (or need statement). This is the first formal document that clarifies the project’s scope for all stakeholders. It must include the problem description and objectives, clearly identify target users, list constraints (budget, time, safety), state assumptions, define exploratory questions, and outline expected outcomes and innovations.

II. The Strategic Foundation: Project Planning

Following the definition of the design need (Step 1), the team moves to project planning (Step 2). This step is essential for eliminating uncertainty, improving operational efficiency, and minimizing the risk of project failure. Planning involves organizing the scope and the resources—time, money, people, and manufacturing/testing capabilities—available to accomplish the design tasks.

The main activities in project planning are:

1. Form a Design Team: The size depends on the project, and team members may hold multiple roles (e.g., product manager and drafter).
2. Develop Tasks and Objectives: Specific activities must be identified, objectives clearly stated, and anticipated outcomes documented. Objectives should be defined in terms of measurable information (deliverables like drawings or test results) that are feasible with available resources.
3. Research the Market: Gather information on existing market solutions, competition (benchmarking), U.S. patents, and relevant trade journals.
4. Estimate Schedule and Cost: Determine the product development cost, assign personnel responsibilities, estimate the percentage of time required, and project the time frame (e.g., number of hours per week).

The Timekeeper: Project Scheduling Tools

Project scheduling is crucial for meeting deadlines. The standard tool for this is the Gantt chart.

A Gantt chart visually represents the timing of various tasks along a horizontal timeline, with tasks listed on the vertical axis. The start and end point of a task are shown by a horizontal bar. A fully completed task is a filled bar, while an unfilled bar shows the fraction of the task remaining. Commercial software like Microsoft Project Manager is often used for this purpose.

However, a major limitation of the Gantt chart is that it does not explicitly display the dependencies among various tasks. Dependencies dictate which tasks must be completed sequentially, which can run in parallel, and which are coupled.

To address this, more advanced tools like the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) chart can be used. The PERT chart is a graphical network diagram that represents both the timing and the dependencies of tasks. It allows project managers to estimate the critical path—the longest chain of dependent tasks that determines the minimum possible project duration. As a project progresses, delays can occur, and the critical path must be re-evaluated, as it is subject to change.

III. The House of Quality: Translating Wants into Specifications

Once the need is defined and the project is planned, the team enters Step 3: design requirements. The goal here is to transform ambiguous customer needs into a set of engineering specifications with specific, quantifiable target values. Failure to do this accurately leads to bad design, higher costs, and market delays.

This conversion is achieved through a technique known as Quality Function Deployment (QFD). Developed in Japan in the mid-1970s and adopted widely in the U.S. since the late 1980s, QFD has been instrumental for companies like Toyota:

QFD helps the design team generate critical information, including:

• The overall specifications or goals for the product.
• How competitors meet the same goals (benchmarking).
• What matters most from the customers’ viewpoint (relative importance).
• The specific, measurable engineering targets to work toward.

QFD is often visualized as the House of Quality (HoQ), a complex matrix structure built by following seven systematic steps:

1. Identification of Customers (“Who” in the HoQ): Customers are not just the end users; they include a variety of personnel and organizations: consumers, stakeholders, designers, management, manufacturing, sales, service teams, and standard organizations (like ASME or ANSI).

2. Customer Requirements Determination (“What” in the HoQ): The team determines what is to be designed based on customer wants. These requirements cover:

• Functional Performance (operational sequence).
• Physical Requirements (space, properties).
• Life-Cycle Concerns (durability, safety, repair, distribution).
• Human Factors (appearance, usage).
• Manufacturing Requirements (materials, quality, company capabilities).
• Resource Concerns (time, cost, standards, environment). The team distinguishes between mandatory requirements (must’s) and optional requirements (want’s), gathered through observation, surveys, and focus groups.

3. Determine Relative Importance of Requirements (“Who versus What”): Each requirement is evaluated for its relative importance, sometimes weighted when different customer groups are involved.

4. Identify and Evaluate Competition (“Now versus What”): This step involves competition benchmarking—determining how customers perceive the competition’s ability to meet each design requirement. This builds awareness of the existing market landscape.

5. Generate Engineering Specifications (“How” in the HoQ): These specifications are the measurable parameters of the customer’s requirements. They tell the design team if the customer’s needs have actually been met. For example, “lightweight” (customer want) is converted to “weight is not more than 1 lb” (engineering specification).

6. Relate Customer Requirements to Engineering Specifications (“What versus How”): This step determines the strength of the relationship between each customer requirement and each engineering specification (e.g., strong, weak, or no relation).

7. Set Engineering Targets (“How Much” in the HoQ): A specific, quantifiable target value is set for each engineering specification. These target values are the standards against which the final product’s ability to satisfy the customer will be evaluated. For instance, “inexpensive” (customer want) translates to “cost is less than $5” (engineering target).

Once the QFD chart is complete, the team produces a formal design project proposal which documents the design need, stakeholder requirements, engineering requirements, and project plan. This proposal, which may include a Gantt chart for scheduling, serves as the final documentation before moving to the idea generation phase.

IV. Unlocking the Design Space: Concept Generation

With the design problem meticulously defined and quantified, the team moves into the conceptual design phase (Phase 3), focusing on concept generation (Step 4 of the overall journey). This is where creativity explodes, utilizing convergent and divergent thinking processes to explore the complete design space.

Ideas often originate from the designer’s personal experience and knowledge, but are systematically enhanced by formalized techniques:

1. Brainstorming Technique

This is a common method where all members of the design team are vigorously encouraged to share every possible idea they have, including those that are silly, crazy, or wild. All ideas are recorded equally, often on post-it notes, for later discussion. Brainstorming sessions typically begin with trigger questions, moving from familiar issues to open, proactive challenges. The fundamental rule is non-judgmental accumulation of ideas. For example, brainstorming uses for a grocery bag might yield items as varied as a mask, a wallet, wrapping paper, or storage containers.

2. SCAMPER Technique

To systematically generate new ideas from existing solutions, the SCAMPER technique, originally introduced by Alex Osborn (1996) and adapted by Robert Eberle, uses specific trigger questions. SCAMPER stands for:

• Substitute (What other materials or methods can be used?)
• Combine (What uses or elements can be joined together?)
• Adapt (What other purposes might this product serve?)
• Minimize/Magnify (What features can be scaled or strengthened/weakened?)
• Put to Other Uses (What other markets exist for this product?)
• Eliminate (What parts can be removed or eliminated?)
• Reverse/Rearrange (What parts can be exchanged or reconfigured in a new pattern?)

3. Mind Mapping Technique

A mind map is a powerful graphical technique that visually represents the design problem, unlocking the potential of the brain and making associations easier. Developed by Tony Buzan, it is useful for consolidating complex information, helping to provide an overall picture of the problem. The process involves drawing a central image representing the design topic, branching out with main themes, and then adding subsequent levels of detail as thoughts occur. The map should be creative, artistic, and colorful.

4. Analogy and Biomimicry

Analogy is a technique where design solutions are identified based on similar problems solved in other, often unrelated, fields. A powerful version of this is biomimicry (nature-inspired design). Since living systems have evolved over millennia to integrate design at multiple scales, solutions from the biological world are adapted to solve engineering problems. Examples include using the strength of the honeycomb pattern for structural applications, or designing cutting shears based on the structure of shark’s teeth.

5. Patent Searches

Patent literature is a crucial source for existing concepts and ideas (known as “prior art”). Reviewing patents is time-consuming but necessary, as patents are classified by class and subclass numbers. The search focuses on identifying existing concepts to avoid duplication and build upon the state of the art.

V. The Final Cut: Rationally Selecting the Best Idea

After the ideation phase, the team typically has a large, sometimes unwieldy, pool of potential solutions. The next step, concept evaluation (Step 4 of the design journey), is a decision-making process where this pool is contracted to identify the one or two optimal concepts for development. The goal is to find a candidate concept that is customer-focused, competitively designed, reduces time to production, and has buy-in from all stakeholders.

This convergence is achieved using both abstract and quantitative techniques:

1. Abstract Screening Methods

• Feasibility Judgment: This abstract method involves asking fundamental questions about a concept: Is it feasible? Does it fail because the technology is unavailable, or merely because it is “different” or unpopular?
• Go/No-Go Screening: This simple technique checks whether a concept can satisfy each of the engineering or customer requirements. Concepts scoring few “no-go” answers are considered for modification; others are often discarded.

2. The Quantitative Measure: The Decision Matrix Technique

For a sophisticated, quantitative evaluation, the Decision Matrix Technique (or Pugh’s method) is employed. This method quickly identifies the strongest concept, helps foster new concepts, and clarifies the team’s understanding of customer requirements.

The process follows five structured steps:

1. Choose Criteria: Use the customer requirements/design specifications established during the QFD process.
2. Develop Weightings: Assign relative importance weightings to each criterion.
3. Select Alternatives: Choose the concepts to be compared, usually represented as sketches at the same level of abstraction.
4. Evaluate Alternatives: This is the core step, where every alternative concept is compared against a datum (a baseline concept, which might be the existing design or the team’s favorite idea).
   • A score of + or +1 is given if the concept meets the criterion better than the datum.
   • A score of S (same) or 0 is given if the concept performs as well as the datum (or if there is uncertainty).
   • A score of - or -1 is given if the concept performs worse than the datum.
5. Compute Satisfaction (Total Score): The total score is calculated, often using the weighted total (where + is +1, - is -1, and S is 0, multiplied by the importance weighting).

If a concept scores well, its strengths are analyzed; conversely, clusters of minus scores reveal requirements that are particularly difficult to meet. If the results are ambiguous (for instance, if many concepts score similarly on a criterion), this suggests the need for more knowledge, clarification of the requirement, or resolution of differing team interpretations. The process is most effective when team members perform the evaluation independently before comparing results, and the comparison is repeated iteratively, potentially using the highest-scoring concept as a new datum, until consensus is reached.

VI. The Conceptual Design Review

After this intensive concept generation and evaluation, the design journey pauses for a crucial milestone: the conceptual design review. This review is conducted with all stakeholders—customers, management, and technical peers—to review the process, the various concepts explored, and the rationale behind selecting the final candidate concept.

Design reviews are essential because they ensure the design meets all project requirements and identify potential problems or risks early, preventing unnecessary costs and failures. The review typically asks if the generated concepts were of sufficient quality, if they were evaluated using customer requirements, and if the final concept meets all requirements and shows promise for innovation. Only after the team achieves stakeholder consensus and approval does the design journey advance to the rigorous and expensive detail design phase.

The successful execution of these early steps—from defining the problem using QFD to rationally selecting the best idea using the Decision Matrix—transforms the design process from a subjective pursuit of innovation into a methodical, accountable business strategy, minimizing risk and maximizing the chances of creating a quality, competitive product.

Analogy: The design journey is akin to launching a high-stakes, cross-country cycling team. First, the team must use the QFD technique to determine the precise requirements (e.g., “the bike must be fast and durable”). This translates the coach’s subjective desire (“fast”) into objective targets (“must maintain 35 mph average speed for 5 hours without material fatigue”). Next, concept generation is the creative frenzy of engineers drafting thousands of frame shapes, wheel materials, and gear systems. Finally, the Decision Matrix acts as the selection committee, systematically comparing every new design against the existing benchmark bike (the datum) based on the criteria (speed, weight, cost, etc.). This ensures the final bike chosen is not merely the flashiest, but the one whose measurable performance characteristics are demonstrably superior to the competition, guaranteeing the highest chance of winning the race (market success).