Design Technology Revision

1. Idea 10. Final Testing/Evaluation

2. Design Brief

3. Research

4. Design Specification

5. Initial ideas

6. Developed Ideas

7. Final Idea/Evaluation

8. Product Plan

9. Manufacture

The design brief explains why your product is needed.

It explains why there might be a need for your product.

It has to include how your product will be used and the environment that it will be used in.

(It first describes the problem there is on the market).

Research helps you to get ideas. The point of research is to:

• Check people actually want your product.
• Find out what makes an existing product good or bad.
• Find out what your target market like or dislike about a similar product.
• Find out about the materials and components that you can use for your product.
• Find out about the costs of different materials and components, as well as how much your product will cost when it is on the market.
• Give you a good, strong starting point for designing.

The different kinds of research are:

• Disassembling an existing product
• Questionnaires for your Target Market
• Measuring the weights and sizes of current products.

The Design Specification is a list of conditions to meet.

They describe the restrictions and possibilities of the product

Include points to describe some or all of these:

• Descriptions of how it should look.
• Details about what it has to do.
• materials/components and joining methods.
• Details of size and weight.
• Safety points to consider.
• Financial constraints.

eg: the material(thin card 180gsm) will be manufactured to +-1mm as this allows room if a mistake is made and allows room for improvements.

(Specifications always have to include a 'BECAUSE').

Initial Ideas are when you start to think of how your product will look and work. You need to come up with a range of ideas/designs.

You should also use a range of drawing techniques for presenting your designs.

E.G. Perspective, Orthographic, Isometric Projection etc...

You need to make sure that each on matches all the specifications.

You need to annotate all of the designs to fully explain your ideas.

This is where you choose an idea from your initial(first) ideas to develop and actually manufacture later on in the process.

This design should have more detail and annotations than the designs before. It should also explain why you chose this design to develop rather than the other ones.

You should also produce sketches in more detail, showing how the parts/components should fit together.

This is when you design your final idea from your developed idea and add more detail.

E.G. add more detail by writing out the measurements of the components/materials.

It can be useful to make a prototype/model of your final idea. The prototype will help you to solve all the potential problems with your design at this stage. next you have to evaluate the final idea as well as the prototype, identifying reasons for selecting or rejecting different aspects of the design.

Evaluation:

• Test all the materials and components for suitability and to see how well they work.
• Compare the good and bad points of existing products with your prototype/model.
• Find out people's(your target market maybe) opinions and preferences about your model/prototype.
• Create questionnaires for your target market to say what they like and dislike about your final design and about your prototype.

Use different charts to help you plan the manufacture of your chosen product. The three different ones are :

• A Table
• A Flowchart
• A Gantt Chart

The purpose of a flow cart and a table is to show the order in which each stage of manufacturing takes place. The different boxes in a flow chart are, and mean;...Sausage shaped: Start and End of the Flow Chart, Rectangular: The Processes, Parallelogram: Introduces a New Material, Diamond: Quality Control Checks.

A Gantt Chart is used as a time plan which shows tha management of the different tasks/ stages in manufacturing your chosen product. The tasks are on the left hand side, and the timings plotted across the top. You can overlap the different stages, E.G. while the graphics are printing you could be drawing out your net either by hand or by using CAD.

You now need to test that the product works and that it meets all the specification points.

For this you should create more questionnaires/surveys for your target market to help you.