Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5a Introduction to week 5 & 6 > Introduction to week 5 & 6
- Last week Doctor Carlos Cardoso explained the basic principles that underlie idea generation.
- Generating ideas is important to gain an understanding of the design problem.
- Through the generation of ideas, you have probably also noticed that you gained an understanding of why certain ideas are meaningful – in the light of your design challenge.
- This is an important mechanism in design: by exploring different ideas for solutions, you gain a deeper understanding of your design problem and challenge.
- You will take the ideas you selected and work towards a design concept by adding and integrating details in an iterative manner.
- In this week, Stefan van de Geer will explain what a design concept entails and how to select between concepts based on your list of requirements.
- This track is created for the extra motivated students and will challenge you to make a prototype of your product idea.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5b Lecture: Creating a list of requirements > Creating a list of requirements
- Hi, my name is Jelle Zijlstra, I’m an industrial designer and design teacher at the TU Delft.
- When designing industrial products you cannot afford to overlook anything because it would require large investments and damage control to change a product after market introduction.
- Beginning designers often concentrate on the user’s experience with the product and overlook important issues like: how many should be produced? What manufacturing processes are available and which are not? How will the product be stored and transported from factory to shop? At what price should it be sold? Should its materials be recyclable? In Delft we have developed a model that helps you to create an overview and structure: the Process Tree.
- Imagine you make a film of the entire lifecycle of the product that you are going to design, from development and production all the way to the use, end of use and discarding the product.
- In step 2 you define and find as many requirements as possible, using the structure and numbering of your Process Tree.
- For example: if you are designing kitchen tools, it’s useful to study the kitchen environment and to make drawings of people using products in the kitchen.
- To avoid mistakes, make sure that your requirements meet some requirements as well: requirements should be relevant and valid; the requirements should be concrete and operational, you should be able to use them to evaluate design proposals; there should be no redundancy, this means avoid defining the same requirement twice in a different form.
- Wishes are used to evaluate design concepts and to decide which one will be developed into the final design.
- You can use it To direct your creativity; As a basis for contracts; To align your development team; And for evaluating and selecting ideas and concepts during your design process.
- If you did, your design will do what it is supposed to do! Thank you for watching and good luck in making your own List of Requirements.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5c Lecture: Developing concepts > Developing concepts
- In our view concepts appear as a milestone in the design process.
- Usually at least three concepts are developed, each with their own pro’s and con’s.
- Before spending a lot of money and time in the next phases of design, a designer wants to discuss these concepts with users and other important stakeholders.
- With one concept only, there would be nothing to choose and not much to discuss.
- Before rushing into the next phase you would like to evaluate how well the concepts solve the earlier identified design problem and to what extend they fulfill the design challenge.
- Our definition of a design concept is therefore “a representation in drawings and text of the design solution that has enough detail to allow you to judge the main functioning of the product, as well as its use, aesthetics, production and commercial possibilities”.
- A design concept should be a realistic solution, but does not have to be validated yet.
- A design concept remains a realistic dream on paper! Sometimes a design concept is defined as “a general idea, something formed in mind”.
- So concepts are preceded by idea generation and idea selection.
- In practise, because of this time restriction, we see to-the-point concise concepts as well as fully detailed concepts which come close to the “preliminary design”.
- One concept based on the philosophy of ‘maximum sustainability’, another on ‘cost efficient’ and the third concept on ‘optimal comfort’.
- Actually it is your choice what view on the design problem you wish to use and till what extend your concepts should be detailed.
- More important is that all concepts that you want to evaluate and decide between, are equally detailed.
- You can understand, that it would not be fair to compare a fully detailed concept with concepts that are roughly detailed.
- The next issue is how you should develop different concepts? Many methods are available to analyse problems, involve users, generate ideas, and evaluate and select.
- Some consider the development of concepts as the process of “Divide-Solve-Reconnect” since most designers tend to do this and divide the development in problem areas or parameters, analyse them and find different possibilities or solutions.
- You have already seen some concept presentations, with drawings and some text.
- If not you will be fooling yourself! Use at least two side view drawings for each concept.
- Use text to describe your vision, clarify the concept or explain your drawings, but keep it to a minimum.
- Above all: keep the style and the level of detail the same for each concept!! Thank you and please do try this at home! “.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5d Lecture: Inspiration for concept sketching > Inspiration for concept sketching
- Hi! I am Koos Eissen, I am responsible for the drawing classes at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering in Delft.
- With the Delft Design Drawing staff we teach students in making informative drawings, in side views as well as in perspective, on paper but also digitally.
- With a combination of pictures, drawings and text we aim for as much visual communication as possible.
- The goal of this exercise is to teach you making drawings or sketches in side view with a little experience and with a minimum of sketching tools.
- Drawings are most likely to express a design within a context.
- I will show you the use of a grey pastel to add the suggestion of volume to a line drawing.
- If you have little experience in drawing, don’t worry.
- Make a print, using tracing paper, quickly make an acceptable drawing.
- We use marker paper, to again trace the drawing.
- A smooth ongoing line, creates a smooth sort of drawing.
- You see? If you have a special change of the surface, like for instance the bottom is a little bit round, You could then start with the tangent lines and the center axis, and now you have a curvature underneath.
- If you want to draw a coffee cup, you can again start with a perspective drawing of it.
- Now you need a grip, so if you normally… if you have hardly any experience in drawing, You will probably make something which is a lookalike of the small sketch which I am making right now.
- We are going to focus on the sketches, because it is a lot of fun to make insightful drawings, a lot of sketches, just getting some ideas, I always start with a centerline, trying to make tangent lines in it, don’t think too loudly, just try to get as much ideas as I can in a minimum of time.
- Don’t be scared about the lines, they sometimes crossing other drawing, it gets more alive by doing so, It is less static.
- So the advice is to make a lot of drawings, In this example you can see there are about 8 drawings on a piece of paper, so maybe in a quarter of an hour you get two or three sheets of paper.
- Adding some shading to it is done now with pastel and you can see the drawing lines change into volumes.
- If you have an object which is partially having cone shapes, and maybe cylinders, spheres, cone shapes upside down, what is then the benefit of shading? Well in theory, I could show you the construction of cast shadows, and about shading.
- So an exercise could be, if you have a long row of different basic shapes, to think over should it be more or lesser shading in a drawing, so a cylinder for instance: has more shading than the top drawn cone shape.
- This is a round shape, which could be regarded as difficult, but if you have a sphere like that, you can just think about a highlighted part, and a sort of moon shaped shading, and this moon shaped shading, is used here as an information just a cutoff of a small part of the sphere.
- The edges of the shading jump, from one direction to another and are never parallel to the shape.
- Of course the product, in your product design is the most important part, to the context is something in relation to the product, so we are going to shade a little bit of the proposal, and maybe you could finalize your drawing by adding a little bit of shading to the person next to the cup, but just a hint, which creates the effect that the person is nearer to you, and the cup is nearer too, and the rest is actually environment.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5e Lecture: Evaluating & deciding between concepts > Evaluating & deciding between concepts
- A life without options is for a designer, like a beach without an ocean.
- Before you can make a decision between options, you will have to evaluate those options to determine their value.
- Designers need to make decisions all along the design process.
- In principle, evaluating your ideas for reducing stress in a user’s morning ritual and choosing the best, does not differ from any other situation where the designer has to decide.
- Unlike many other types of decisions, design decisions have to do with many criteria.
- Some of the decision making methods are used in situations with much uncertainty.
- In this lecture we will exclude these methods and focus on methods where consequences of a chosen option depends on the alternatives only.
- A third condition for design decisions is that we assume ONE decision maker only, or, a group of individuals with the same goal Nevertheless decision makers with different goals exist, but for them other methods need to be used.
- Evaluating alternatives, by giving them a value, is not the only aspect that makes a decision.
- Decisions are also influenced by the willingness of the decision maker to take risk and by his or her use of intuition.
- A director and the designer of a company might invest one hundred thousand dollars in the production of a new product because marketing predicted high sales volume.
- They might even be opposed by others, with different goals, because one of the earlier innovations flopped! In the decision making process, the designer might trust his intuition to influence the decision as well, particularly when he has relevant experience with making similar decisions in the past.
- There is no such thing as the ‘one and only’ right decision in design.
- So let’s take a look at a typical design situation.
- Some paint gets into the rim of and soon the paint drips over the edge.
- This will result in frustration and perhaps a feeling of incompetence “why can’t I paint without making a mess?” This problem has been tackled many times and the designer in our example comes up with three different solutions in the form of concepts.
- The designer wants to evaluate these alternatives and choose one of them for further elaboration.
- If this would be the case the decision is easy and you would not need this lecture.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5g Reflecting on your work > Benchmark video week 5
- So after deciding on ideas, it is time to bring them to the concept level.
- Yes, so after that we can decide on which concept to continue with.
- If you turn your ideas into a concept it is important to get them to a similar level.
- When you turn them into a concept what I always do is think about three words: use, design and technology.
- I just want to make one step in every direction when I turn them into a concept, so shall we do that? Yeah, let’s do that! When you think all concepts are on a similar level, check their comparability.
- So fill in the wishes, then you can rank the concepts one, two and three.
- So make sure to discuss your decisions when you choose your concept.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > 5g Reflecting on your work > Reflections from an expert
- So you can really say that the ideation phase also serves to have a discussion with the client and to evaluate and explore which direction we need to go.
- Well, to start with at van Berlo we really think that it is important that every concept really is an answer to that concept direction that you discussed with the client and that every concept is meaningful.
- So it needs to be an answer to the problem definition and you really have to feel and be convinced that every concept is high quality and that it is a meaningful answer.
- Then it really helps to rank the criteria, to give marks to them and then to see how it turns out.
- Because you really need to confirm that you agree with the outcome and that you really have the feeling that this is indeed right.
- What we realized at Van Berlo quite a lot is that the quality of your criteria really determines the quality of the outcome and of the final result.
- If you define your criteria really make sure that you know why every criterium is in there and how it links to the problem definition and why it is important.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > * Sofa session – Reflection on week 4: Generating ideas > Sofa session week 5
- Welcome at already the fifth Sofa Session, a reflection on week 4 about Generating ideas.
- We see carefully more and more of you uploading your templates with ideas.
- From my own experience as a designer and from my experience as a design educator I know that it is not always easy to share these first ideas, because they might be not feasible yet, or not ready to resist criticism.
- Some of you communicate ideas by text only; others use mood boards and sketches of how the idea could look like.
- Anyway sketch at least as much as possible, because the act of sketching will help you to reflect on your thoughts and to generate new ideas.
- This is the work from [name] and I show this because she used only text and I would like to show you, how you can have a much better picture of the idea if you make a little sketch.
- Her challenge is to bring people in a good mood in the morning and I think that her idea’s are very nice(based on psychology).
- The first idea is for example that a projector shows a happy mood in your room and here I made an small sketch how that could look like.
- He has three clear ideas and the first one is made on your mood and I think it’s very nice how he used a analogy.
- His ideas are quite abstract, actually that is why I also not really understand them fully.
- It’s something with lego blocks and kind of award for children during the morning ritual, because his challenge is to have parents and kids a joyful morning ritual.
- This is the example of [name], the challenge is to wake up without disturbing your partner and the idea’s are very well visualized and explained on the same level.
- A last tip: It is quite possible that your idea already exist.
- Maybe your basic idea exists, but you find a way to improve it.
- Remember at least that you cannot literally copy an existing idea, not for this course, and not in practice.
- I wish you a lot of fun with the development of one of your ideas into concepts!”.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > *Sofa session – Reflection on week 5: Developing and evaluating concepts > Sofa session week 6
- Welcome at already the sixth sofa session, a reflection on week 5 by developing a evaluating concept.
- The deadline is next week but some of you are already sharing results and that’s great, because others can learn from you and maybe you think even: I can do better.
- In the first one you develop for each idea a concept, in the second approach you first select the most promising idea and then from there you develop three concepts.
- I prefer the second one because then you have more time to go in depth and end up with detailed concepts.
- Think of aspects such as functions, form, technical visibility and do not forget also to look if your idea already exist and if so how you can bring it a step further.
- The size, you can draw your concept in context, for example: with a person, a hand or something with a size we are familiar with, a pen, a cup etc.
- This is for example clear in the concept what I find on the discussion forum, decision drawer.
- Think also about materials and texture, you can think for example: wood, textile, plastic, metal, glass, concrete etc.
- Maybe some criteria are too difficult to evaluate yet, because your concepts are not detailed enough.
- Therefor choose criteria that help you to compare the concept in this fase of your process.
- Ok, then the third tip is about your concept choice.
- Some of you may have concepts that have some interesting aspects.
- If you have difficulties to choose and after evaluation and more thinking you can also combine strong aspects of different concepts and develop them into a fourth concept.
Week 5 & 6: Developing & evaluating concepts