Activity 3: Overview

In the previous activity you studied four of the phases of the life cycle of engineering products. This activity returns to the first phase: the design phase.

During the design phase, the product’s design evolves from a design brief, or simple idea, to a detailed specification of the product’s design. In order to achieve this effectively, design scientists, such as Gerhard Pahl and Wolfgang Beitz (Pahl et al. 2007), recommend that the design of a product is performed in four stages. These are:

• the problem formulation stage
• the conceptual design stage
• the embodiment design stage
• the detail design stage.

Focusing on the conceptual design stage

This activity will start by giving an overview of the stages of the engineering design process, then it will break the stages down and look more closely at each of them, focusing in particular on the conceptual design stage. As you will see, this focus is important because this is the most critical and creative stage in the design process.

The conceptual design stage is divided into four steps:

• identifying the functions of the product
• finding solutions for each function
• combining the solutions into different design concepts
• evaluating the design concepts to choose the best one.

Are you ready? Let’s go!

Learning objectives

• Summarise the four stages of the engineering design process.