Abstract:
Customer requirements and engineering specifications will influence the direction of the design in any product, so it is crucial to make the requirements as stable as possible so quality designs can be produced on time within a budget. It would be optimal for requirements and specifications to remain constant but many requirements will change during the evolution of a design. These requirement changes can result in the disruption of the product development schedule, increased development costs, and failure to meet customer requirements.
For this work product development strategies for minimizing the adverse impact of changing design requirements were adapted from previous work in mechanical design, software design and project management. They were applied in the context of new product development for the BugID project, an interdisciplinary system designed to identify arthropods through microscope imaging. In the application four main strategic categories were identified:
Customer Interface, Iterative Design Process, Future Analysis and Change Tolerance Architecture. These four categories formed two sets of coupled categories: a set including customer interface and iterative design process and the set of future analysis and change tolerance architecture. These strategies for design during changing requirements will continually be applied to the development of mechanical design solutions for the BugID project as well as establish a more systematic design methodology for designing under changing requirements. This methodology is anticipated to be applicable to many interdisciplinary product innovation scenarios.
