Getting Designs off to a Better Start: Conceptual Design

By barb schmitz | Published: June 3, 2011

The very earliest stage of product development, the conceptual phase, plays a very critical role in the eventual success of a new product. Choosing the wrong concept can lead manufacturers down a path to increased design complexity, mandatory redesign, missed deadlines, and growing product cost, and at its worst, can literally bankrupt a business. Assumptions and decisions made at this stage will have a tremendous impact on the product’s design, manufacturing and life so selecting the right concept is probably the most crucial decision manufacturers will make.

During the conceptual stage, engineers and designers rapidly explore and refine ideas. Design participants will engage in free-flowing collaborative brainstorming, exploring a range of design options—in the form of sketches, 2D drawings and layouts, and 3D models—until a final concept design is chosen. Concepts can be start out as designers sketching on paper, though eventually more realistic models need to be created to mimic the function, movement, and look of the real product.

The concept phase, however, isn’t simply a group of people ogling over highly stylized rendered images of concept designs. In many industries, like industrial equipment, aerospace and defense, etc., functional requirements outweigh the importance of aesthetics and styling. In these cases, the design team must take into account the functional requirements of the design (design intent), along with customer needs, manufacturability, environmental issues, and BOM cost issues. In some industries, such as high tech or consumer goods, the functional requirements may be secondary to styling issues, such as curved, sweeping surfaces.

Design intent is the intelligence that defines the fit and function requirements of the product. The ultimate success of the final product hinges upon design intent being captured early; encapsulated in the concept model and maintained throughout the design cycle—all without stifling creativity. Pie-in-the-sky concepts won’t hold up well during the mechanical design process when limiters like physics, mathematics, manufacturability, industry standards, and customer requirements come to bear.

One common mistake is focusing in on one concept too early in the process, often due to outside pressures (marketing demos needed for trade shows, consumer retail cycles, R&D budgets, and competitors).  The result is often bad design decisions, forcing designers, now committed to a concept, to work around complications as they rear their ugly heads throughout the rest of the development process.

In order to prevent such disasters, manufacturers need to really take their time during this crucial phase. Don’t narrow in on one concept too soon and assign multiple designers to flesh out multiple concepts concurrently. Then have several concepts detailed to the point at which the design team can determine with the highest level of confidence, which designs will work. After all, if a design isn’t going to fulfill its design requirements, this is the time to find out.

Tools of the Trade

To facilitate this iterative process, engineers must have the design tools that are very flexible as design concepts at this stage are fluid, changing often. Once created, proposed design concepts—whether in the form of sketches, 2D drawings or 3D models—must be reviewed by the extended design team and perhaps customers, and refined quickly based on their input.  Iterations should be constant at this stage so the design tools must be easy and intuitive enough to be used by non-CAD specialists as well. Often these tools may be different from the MCAD tools used during the detailed design phase.

When conceptual models are handed off to the engineering team and recreated in a MCAD system, not only does this lead to inefficiency in recreating what already exists, but often designs often change dramatically.  This misinterpretation of concept models is often caused by a communication gap between conceptual or industrial designers and the mechanical engineers tasked with creating the 3D CAD model on which the final product will be built. This disconnect between the design/styling team and the rest of the product development team often leads to loss of design intent as designs progress through the design cycle.

One way to mitigate this risk is to choose a suite of design tools that span both concept and detailed design stages. By offering bi-directional interoperability, these tools can reduce the risk of this communication gap and eliminate the need for engineers to reinterpret or re-create designers’ conceptual models, safeguarding design intent and facilitating the re-use of design data so mechanical engineers are not starting from scratch once concept models are approved.

When conceptual design tools and MCAD tools have interoperability with each other, mechanical engineers can simply bring approved sketches, drawings, even 3D concept models into their CAD software and then get to work further refining the model into a true 3D digital model or virtual prototype that can be ultimately designed, tested, and built.