Brainstorming
Brainstorming encourages people to generate a vast variety of ideas and solutions that can stimulate mental capabilities of people leading them to the expedient results.
The main method of the brainstorming requires involvement of several members of the project team, ideally between six and ten. This number involves all expertise, imagination, and open mind of all team members. An idea proposed by one team member can be grasped by another one, possibly, more creative and experienced, and taken to the next stage.
Selection of evaluation criteria
Selection of evaluation criteria is an important step in evaluation of different concepts developed in the project. Evaluation criteria directly relate to customer’s needs, determining the quality of the proposed solutions and their compliance with the project requirements.
All evaluation criteria fall under five major categories.
- Relevance
- Efficiency
- Effectiveness
- Impacts
- Sustainability
Generation of alternatives
Given that an iterative process is required to solve an engineering problem and that design constraints need to be respected, generation of the concept alternatives and selection of conceptual design is the most critical step in product development.
The overall concept generation process can be accomplished in four major steps:
- Clarification and decomposition of the problem
- Search for Solutions
- Analysis and Exploration of the Solutions
- Refining the Solutions
Evaluation of design solutions and decision making
When all customer needs and designed requirements are fully defined, you can start to generate multiple design solutions, or concepts. The next step is to choose only one solution that matches the initial requirements and specifications in a best way.
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Criteria selection
Evaluation criteria may be used as well as optimization criteria when optimization is part of the design process.
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Decision making
Returning to the selection of the concept to develop, you may use an evaluation procedure consisting of the three major steps:
- Screening, to eliminate concepts that are not feasible.
- Comparison, to evaluate remaining concepts in compliance with the adopted evaluation criteria.
- Decision making, to select the best concept for further development.
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Pugh matrix
One of the most effective tools for the selection among several candidate design options is the Pugh matrix. The matrix is built when evaluation criteria are identified and clearly defined.