Market phase and specification formulation

This is one of the SEED Curriculum for Design: Preparation Material for Design Teaching reports. These reports provide an integrated series of preparation material for design teaching. SEED (Sharing Experience in Engineering Design) is an organisation of teachers of design in tertiary education.

The Market Phase is the first major phase in the total design activity and is followed by the Specification Phase. Indeed, the Product Design Specification (PDS) produced during the Specification Phase may be described as a statement of market needs. It forms the essential foundation for competitive design and greatly influences the probability of a successful outcome. The PDS must itself be soundly based and this necessitates a thorough market investigation. The market phase and PDS formulation are therefore closely related, which is the justification for the title of this document. Whilst there appears to be a growing awareness of the importance of the PDS in some areas of industry and academia, the approach by which they are formulated in practice is frequently lacking in breadth and thoroughness. It is necessary to impart to students not only the importance of the PDS but also the modus operandi for creating a reliable document. The key is information and its processing.

This booklet identifies the information areas requiring exploration, and a structured, albeit flexible, approach to processing information in order to formulate a PDS. It also provides guidance on the compilation of the PDS itself. The booklet may be used as a text upon which to base lectures, for exercises in market information processing and specification formulation, and as an aid at the commencement of design projects. The approach is applicable irrespective of engineering discipline although the terminology used may vary. For example, the term ‘brief’ in civil engineering is synonymous with ‘specification’ in electrical and mechanical engineering. Hence the term ‘product’, used throughout this document, may refer to any outcome from a design project be it a civil engineering structure, chemical engineering process, mechanical engineering system, electronic circuit, on an industrial or consumer product.

The report provides an introduction, topic definition, rationale, educational aims and objectives and chapters on the market and specification phases in total design, the market phase, the specification phase, when and how taught, a demonstration exercise and references.

[Description and screenshot taken from the SEED Curriculum for Engineering Design page for this report. (c) The Design Society used under the terms of their (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) license.]

Link: http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/teachers/curriculum/market/mktphasehome.html
Author: Douglas G. Smith; Robert G. Rhodes
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
Rights: Copyright 2011 The Design Society - This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. See http://www.bath.ac.uk/idmrc/themes/projects/delores/co-design-website/teachers/curriculum/about.html