Vintage Flock: the Info Repository

Developing a design concept is "fun", and this is where your imagination can run free and you can come up with new and creative ideas. You are not trying just to design something that looks new, but you are trying to find a balance between all the different factors that influence your product or output. The product must appeal to its intended users at a variety of levels: function, usability, cost, reliability, shape & colour, etc. This is why it is so important to study the design problem so carefully. Without really understanding the problem, there is little hope of generating concepts that can be turned into realisable products that satisfy all its requirements.

"Brainstorming is a great way to stimulate the develop of ideas and concepts."

It's important to be able to "think outside the box" - to come up with different (not necessarily better or worse) solutions. If you can do that often enough, then eventually you shall have a really great idea. With practice and experince, you can improve the odds that the different ideas you have will be good ones.

In order to develop a concept, the following stages are used:

• Concept ideation, as the term implies, is about forming ideas. Ideation is generally a cognitive task - it's something you do with your brain. Some people ideate best alone, others work better in teams. Within the scope of design engineering, concept ideation is about looking at the requirements of a problem and coming up with a short description of the general class of product that can satisfy the requirements.
• Concept Generation, is a layout or drawing of a product. Usually, concepts are best described by an annotated sketch.
• Concept Modification, evaluating sets of possible concepts you can use tools (i.e decition matrix or decition tree) to eliminated more than half of the designs (the bad designs), then you can now focus on improving the remaining concepts.
• Concept Validation, in design requires the approval of the deliverable (in this case, a concept) by all interested stakeholders. In the "real world" this will include your corporate leadership (i.e. the boss), any potential clients, sales & marketing people, other engineers, etc.