Conceptual Design

It is a process in which we initiate the design and come up with a number of design concepts and then narrow down to the single best concept. This involved the following steps.

1. Identification of customer needs: The mail objective of this is to completely understand the customers’ needs and to communicate them to the design team
2. Problem definition: The mail goal of this activity is to create a statement that describes what all needs to be accomplished to meet the needs of the customers’ requirements.
3. Gathering Information: In this step, we collect all the information that can be helpful  for developing and translating the customers’ needs into engineering design.
4. Conceptualization: In this step, broad sets of concepts are generated that can potentially satisfy the problem statement
5. Concept selection: The main objective of this step is to evaluate the various design concepts, modifying and evolving into a single preferred concept.

Embodiment Design

It is a process where the structured development of the design concepts takes place. It is in this phase that decisions are made on strength, material selection, size shape and spatial compatibility. Embodiment design is concerned with three major tasks – product architecture, configuration design, and parametric design.

1. Product architecture: It is concerned with dividing the overall design system into small subsystems and modules. It is in this step we decide how the physical components of the design are to be arranged in order to combine them to carry out the functional duties of the design.
2. 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.
3. 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. One of the important aspects of parametric designs is to examine if the design is robust or not.