Edited Transcript for Where does design begin?
Mark Brinkerhoff: So where does the design begin? Where does the designer begin to do his or her work? That's a question many people have asked, and it starts right after an idea and a specification is created to support it. Let's say you have an idea and believe it's a really good one, you're ready to start the design, but you're not quite ready in the designer's eyes. What does he or she need to get the program going, even if it's yourself? Well, it's a list of requirements, and I call those market requirements documents MRD or a PRD, which is a product requirements document. And simplistically, those are just lists of specifications important to the design. And it doesn't matter what the idea is. It could be a camera, not unlike the one here from Toshiba. We did this one long ago, but it started with a list of core requirements.
This is a rather old one by today's standards, but it has all the detailed design components. There are over 200 parts to this. So where does design start on this? So once the specifications are there and everybody agrees, which is often a challenge, you begin the design. So what's in a design? I like to start with the components that go within a design. So speaking from the camera analogy, what components are typical in a camera? Well, there's a lens. In this case, it's a zoom lens. You'll need some batteries; in this case, there are four. Well, this camera needs to have a flash. Most cameras today do. But there was a long period where they didn't. They were just without, and they had to have the adjustment to deal with room light.
But this one has a flash. So you'll need switches, cameras are full of switches, little buttons and knobs and rotary features and such. And so all these devices and many others are components within this camera, which are necessary to create it. So when we start to design, we build the interior elements, or the guts as we call it, right off the bat. We load them into CAD and place them in relatively important positions. So that's the beginning of our design effort. So that's how to get started with design.
Last edited: 07/13/2023
