Author John Steinbeck once said “Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen”. (Haik and Shahin 2011: 180).
The student engineer can generally find this stage very difficult. Too often, you have a single idea in your head that you’ve had from the beginning and don’t allow yourself the freedom to explore other options; becoming precious and defensive of it. This does not lead to an affective concept design phase. At this stage you should not concern yourself too much with manufacturing detail, cost and aesthetics (Hawkes and Abinett 1984: 11) or even reality, to an extent; so as not to let them guide prescribe, and risk hindering the process.
The Concept Design stage is the most creative and innovative stage of the whole process. Concepts represent multiple solutions to the problem (Haik and Shahin 2011: 173). It takes the technical requirements you’ve gathered and using them as a framework, turn them into something exciting and new. This can be a deceptively difficult stage, so pay attention to the few simple pointers.
Throughout this stage you should also be considering how this should be manufactured. Many items can fail when it get to that final stage, when it’s too expensive or perhaps can’t be made using existing technology. In the 2009 Series Design for Life, episode 6 (available on CURVE.coventry.ac.uk), Dick Powell states, “If you get to the point of manufacture and then find out that what you’ve done is unworkable, you’ve failed, it’s that simple. Design is about making things that can be done, not making dreams” (2009).
Selected References
Design for Life (2009) [online DVD] available from <http://curve.coventry.ac.uk> [02/09/11]
Link to Sketching
Link to Brainstorming Ideas
Link to Morphological Analysis
Back to Concept Design
Back to MAE Design Model