The creative attitude-

Perhaps the most important determinant of the creative effort is the attitude one bring to the task problem solving. More often than not, the negative outlook and pessimism stand between the designer and the truly innovative design. Self-confidence and a positive outlook appears to be essential ingredients of good designers.

The creative attitude-

Perhaps the most important determinant of the creative effort is the attitude one bring to the task problem solving. More often than not, the negative outlook and pessimism stand between the designer and the truly innovative design. Self-confidence and a positive outlook appears to be essential ingredients of good designers.

Solving the design problem creativity

Once the need is throughly analysed, and the design problem properly understood, there comes the all-important phase of thinking up ways to meet the design requirements subject to the design constraints. If the problem is not a trivial one or if it has not been previously solved in its entirety, the process of thinking up feasible solutions is not a straight-forward one for which a complete setoff rules or procedures can be prescribed.

Resources-

We may consider resources from two view points. One, the resources with the manufacturer of the device and two, the resources available with the users of the system, that is, the customers. The resources may be expressed as positive statements of availability or as negative statements of non-availability that can be called the constraints on the design. If we designing a bicycle for Indian villages to be manufactured at the small-scale industries level, the constraints of resources with the manufacturer consist of non-availability of heavy machinery, of highly-skilled labor and of high quality steel. The constraints of resources with the customer or the users may primarily be the lack of skilled repairmen. This may dictate the keeping of design as simple and easy to maintain as possible.

Environmental factors-

Temperature variations have important bearings on the design of the engine cooling system. Low temperature can cause such problems as icing thecarburators of aircraft engines. High temperature on the other hand reduce the structural strength of materials. Many electronic components do not work satisfactorily in temperature 60 degree celcius.
Vibration levels and accelerations have adverse effects on almost all systems. Vibration introduces a serious problem in aircraft structures because of fatigue.

Standards of performance-

Standards of performance are the set of complex requirement that cover a wide field which may include such things as reliability level, safety, convenience in use, adaptability under various condituons, ease of maintainance and cost. Each of these must be considered and due attention paid while designing. At the need analysis stage itself one must list the relevant performance parameters and, if possible, decide on the minimum acceptable performance on each of those parameters. This only settles tha minimum that must be met, and the competing designs are judged depending on how much they better these minimums. However, there are cases where deciding a priori the minimum is not at all an easy task.

Specifications-

Writing specifications usually calls for collecting information. The designer also needs to collect information about how high a person can write and how he can comfortably reach. This information would again be stastical in nature and the designer has to make a decision as regards how tall a person he should design the lowest point on the board for, and how short a person he should highest point on the board cater.

Analysis of Need-

There are basically two aspects in obtaining this definition, namely the specifications and performance parameters or standards of performance. Roughly speaking, specifications refer to the normal function requirements of a design that every design concept must meet, and standards of performance refer to those standards against which the competing designs can be judged.
The same requirement can have two different roles under two different design conditions. The cost of a car may be a specification if we are designing one for the middle-income group, but only a standard of performance will be the requirement if for entering it in an automobile race.

High level of preliminary need statement-

The higher the level, the wider is the span of concerns, but lesser is the possibility of attention to the details. An architect while designing the overall relationships among the spaces she creates has to worry about the location of windows and shutters. However, she obviously cannot be expected to consider the details of hinges and sashes to be used on the window frames. It is usually the interior designer who has to worry about these details, but if she too decides to design at the level of the inter-relationships between spaces rather than forever have an unfinished project on our hands. Somebody has to design at the lowest level of scope as well.

Preliminary Need Statement-

In this situation, the identification of the true need, simple as it may appear, is crucial first step in the design process, and one that is the stripping point for many projects. Quite often, the designers and the sponcers of the design identify the wrong need and take up a wrong problem to handle. This happens because quite frequently a designer starts thinking of the solutions enen before he has clearly identified the need and, thus, he is foredoomed to take the wrong track.

True need-

A design exists solely in response to a specified or a perceived need and, therefore, the satisfaction of that need is the most essential function of a design. However, this is not as simple as it appears. Very, often the statement of need that a designer starts her work with, is incomplete or even misleading. One of the most difficult problems faced by a designer is to isolate the ‘true’ need of a given situation from all the various expressions of need that she may be given.

Realization of need (2)-

Recognizing a need is in itself a creative process. It takes organized thinking and a disciplined mind, forever on the look out for challenging situations, to perceive most needs. Many of the great designers had an uncanny sense of recognizing the needs of society much before society itself realized them. Many of the problem encountered by a practicing engineer are however those that are communicated to him by his employers or customers

Realization of need (2)-

Recognizing a need is in itself a creative process. It takes organized thinking and a disciplined mind, forever on the look out for challenging situations, to perceive most needs. Many of the great designers had an uncanny sense of recognizing the needs of society much before society itself realized them. Many of the problem encountered by a practicing engineer are however those that are communicated to him by his employers or customers

Realization of need (1)-

The beginning of every design project is recognition of need. A need may be the just wish of a lazy man who wants to a robot to get him a glass of water when he is relaxing in an easy chair. Inventions are not for just fulfilling our material needs. If we look at the evaluation of almost any product we see that we are neversatisfied with just the basic product that does the job adequetly. We want beauty and ornamentation as well as in our machines and tools. Most of the early technology was concerned with development of dyes, paints and pigments for decorating clothes we wear, walls of our temples, houses, and other material things like ploughs, kitchen utensils and swords

Design making and iteration-

Design making plays a crucial role in the design activity. As already indicated, a desiger has to evaluate various alternatives at each stage and make a decision as to what promises to be the best. It should be remembered that most, if not all, design decisions are decisions under uncertainty and insufficient information. The uncertainty arises out of two sources. One, in which it is due to the reason that the required additional information depends upon the decision itself and two, in which it is due to stastically random processes.

Detailed design phase

In this stap the preliminary design is carried through to finality. Detailed dimensions, tolerences, finishes and other neering descriptions are furnished in this step. The optimum use of resources, both raw materials and production facilities is also ensured. The outcome of this stage is a design complete in every way so that it defines the exact product as it would be when it comes off the production line. The only step after this is the implementation of the design and its testing.

Convergence phase-

In which the designer attempts to eliminate the unworlable and the not-so-good solutions thrown up in the creative search for ideas. He attempts to converge on to the best solution under the given condition of the problem. It involves choosing from among the various possible creative transactions, developing it further, testing it as to wheather it can fulfill all the expectations, resolving sub-problems that may crop up at this stage.

Transformation phase-

In this phase the most exciting part. This is the creative phase wherein the designer summons all his experience, innovative capabilities, insights and genius to think up plausible schemes for achiving the desired result.For this, he uses the information collected in the first phase. This phase is termed as transformation because it serves as a bridge between the information concerning the problem and inputs on the one hand and the desired results on the other.

Explorative phase-

In this phase the aim of the deigner is to get as much understanding of the problem as possible. This understanding usually involves getting familiar with the exact nature of the problem, a research into the existing solutions, their shortcomings, etc. it is necessary that in this explorative phase the designer takes care not to be unduly influenced by the existing designes.

A Description of the Design Process-

The notion that a beginner in design may have about designing is that it involves high-level creativity, flashes of insight, inspired guesswork, or that it is work of major or minor geniuses and eccentrics. He may picture a designer slaving away at his drawing board along with his computer. He may imagine adesigner to be a mechanical mind tinkering away with assorted hardware and junk in his backyard. If one casually reads the case studies of innovative products, the design activity appears to be more like a lucky breake than a serious, planned scientific work.

Modern design problems-

Modern design problems are far more complicated than the traditional ones and cannot be handled by the method of trial and error because of the following reasons-
1) The traditional craftsman made things on a very small scale and thus the penalty of a wrong choice of design was limited.
2) The increasing scale of production has also introduced another complication in the process of design.
3) The rapid pace of technology change makes drastic and novel demands that cannot be met by small change.
4) The traditional designer was concerned with only one component or one product at a time.