Engineering Design Process

The engineering design process is fundamentally about making decisions on design. Ideally, you are able to make all your decisions with qualitative data (math and numbers) because math will be your best guess at how to solve something in the best way. However, for any moderately complex or high level decision, there will still be some decisions that aren’t going to be quantifiable (for context, in a professional setting, you’ll typically get to 80% of decision being driven by qualitative data). The goal of going through a design process is to have a framework to make as many decisions driven by data as possible.

Typically, your design process looks like a flowchart that looks something like this:

Define Problem - Decide what the problem is that you’re trying to solve, try to get as many of them to be quantitative as possible. You want to be able to break down the qualitative problem of getting the car to be good into a set of quantitative metrics.

Define Goals, Requirements, Constraints

Requirements: Things you have to make happen to achieve your goal, true/false conditions
Constraints: The limits of what you are able to do, true/false conditions
Goals: What you want to achieve and how important each of those goals are

Requirements and constraints will set your allowed “ranges“ of allowable values for your quantitative metrics and on which end of those metrics you want to be on. Goals will help you make trades between your different goals to figure out what you are willing to sacrifice to help something else

Review is an import part of the design process since you’ll never be able to catch all of the problems with a design alone. Its a good idea to get more eyes on a design and the earlier you can do it, the better since you will be able to avoid wasting a large amount of work

WIP