Design

Design

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for problem

for research

for initial ideas

for solution

for manufacture

for evaluation

The Problem is the starting point.  We start with a problem usually from a given Brief.  The Brief might say something along the lines of  ‘Design an item to store personal items’ or ‘A company requires a new range of seating options for its customers’.  You start with the Brief , whatever that might be, and you work towards a Solution.  As you can see, there are stages in between these where we need to carry out some research and where we start to generate some initial ideas.  These will at a later stage n the design process, be developed to a point where we can decide upon the best one to suit the particular problem needing to be resolved.  

So lets start with a problem.  ‘Design an item to store personal items that would be suitable for teenagers’  The first step in the design process is to ‘Analyse The Brief’  The more time you take to do this correctly the better.  So the first stage here would be to decide what would be considered personal items.  Typically, a pupil would pick a Smart Phone, although there are many other items to choose from.  Now we need to look again at the given Brief to further analyse it.  Suitable for teenagers, well this obviously means people from 13 years old up to 19 years old.  We keep going back to the brief until we have picked out all of the relevant information given and highlight this in some way.

Now we have analysed the Brief we need to Research the things that will help us move forward, and influence our design ideas. There are 2 methods of research ‘Primary Research and Secondary Research’.  For our purposes here we will carry out Primary Research, which simply means we do the research ourselves.  So what do we need to research?  Well one thing would be the types and sizes of the smart phones that teenagers use.  Another might be what things appeal to teenagers or what their interests are.  There are many areas of research you could carry out and you will have to decide what you think is most important and would help you come up with a good design solution to the problem here.

Having carried out our research, hopefully we will have started to imagine in our head what sort of ideas we could work on.  It might be that during your research you looked at storage ideas already available or you might have seen something that was a particular shape or colour you liked, and so on.  It might be that you yourself, if you are a teenager, might have a particular interest or theme you would like to influence your ideas in some way.  Whatever, you will now need to put down on paper some ‘Initial Ideas’.  Rough sketches are good at this stage, with supporting ‘Annotations’ if possible.  Annotating your ideas simply means writing comments around them.  You might write something like ‘this could be sat on a bedside table’ or ‘this could be made from a material that would be attractive to teenagers’ or ‘this could also hold an additional item like a watch or bangles’ .

We work the ideas, developing them as we move these forward in the design process.  We might add some detail, show how parts join together, work out the sizes of each part, or whatever you think needs done to progress your ideas.  Decisions will also need to be made as not all of your ideas will be likely be as good as each other, and may not suit the brief.  You will have to stop developing some of your ideas before reaching a point where you decide on one.  This idea should remain in place after having considered all of the key points.  Here, in this example you would consider how well the deign idea could store a phone and how appealing it would be to teenagers.  Another factor you might well have to consider is how complex the design is, and try to work out if you could actually make it in the time available with the resources you have at hand.  All of these things taken into account, you should now have what you consider to be the best ‘Solution’ to the problem.

The design part over you will now have to put together some information to allow it to be ‘Manufactured’.  A good place to start might be a list of parts showing the materials to be used with the sizes of each part.  Orthographic and other drawings to show what it looks like assembled, or in an exploded form, or where joint or holes go, and anything else that would help someone build this item without your presence.  If this is done correctly you should be able to give this piece of work to someone with your own skills and they should be able to ‘Manufacture it by working through the information you have put down.

The last thing we need to do when it has been made is check how well it works.  We ‘Evaluate’ it.  This ‘Evaluation’ has to be done properly, and there are several techniques that can be used here.  We could carry out a ‘Survey’ using a range of teenagers to get feedback on how they think it looks.  We could ask them to use it ‘User Trial/Trip’and ask them to try to store their phone, and ask them to give it a mark out of 10 for how easy they found using it.  We could sit down at a desk with some smart phones and use it ourselves, trying various types and sizes of phones to see if they could all be stored in it ‘Bench Test’.

Your final design should be able to meet the points highlighted when analysing the brief, and all of the points listed in the ‘Specification’.  We will discuss the ‘Specification’ later.

Design Folio Basics