Optimal Design Challenges

Engineer and author Henry Petroski once wrote: “Successful design is not the achievement of perfection but the minimization and accommodation of imperfection.” I like that. It rings true with a practicality missing in “the relentless pursuit of perfection” mantras you hear in commercials.

A successful design is the optimal design for a given set of constraints and requirements. Among those constraints are often time and money. In fact, when asked to rank challenges to their day-to-day workflow, the nearly 900 DE readers who responded to our 2015 Reader Profile survey chose “short development deadlines” and “inadequate budgets” at their second- and third-most “extremely important” challenges. That’s why bringing more technology to bear sooner in the design cycle is so critical. Simulation, optimization and real-time rendering—all accelerated by increasingly powerful computing—pays dividends in time and cost savings when they’re performed early and often. Likewise, 3D printing for prototyping and—under increasingly expanding circumstances—end use parts, removes time and cost from product development, testing and manufacturing.

But, perhaps surprisingly, collaboration ranked a bit higher than challenges associated with time and budgets on our readership survey. Plus, “inefficient workflows,” a challenge that combines both time and collaboration issues, moved into the top five “extremely important” challenge rankings.

Collaboration a Cause for Concern

As products become more complex and connected, designers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers and software developers—who are often dispersed across the globe—need to work together more closely than ever to quickly get optimal products manufactured and to market. It’s the market that ultimately determines whether a product is successful, so executives and marketing colleagues need to be brought into the product development cycle as early as possible to ensure all your design and engineering efforts aren’t for not. And those go-to-market decisions are influenced by consumers’ ever-changing wants and needs, which makes collecting, filtering, analyzing and incorporating usage data back into a design a top priority. That data can also be used to alert engineers to service records and part failures that can point toward design improvements.

The flow of information around the product development cycle and up and down the supply chain has been the subject of many nice flowcharts, but in the real world it’s not so neatly done. Creating a product development platform or system that reaches across disciplines and industries, and integrates with other information management systems to keep everyone properly informed is no small feat. Just sifting through the data—especially the increased amount of data expected to come from the Internet of Things and Industrial Internet in the near future—is a daunting challenge.

Optimal Design Technology Outlook

This year-end edition of DE addresses what we see as some of the top challenges facing design engineers in 2016, including expanding the use of optimization technologies, attempts to structure an approach to collaboration, combining real-world data with digital design processes, designing products for the Industrial Internet and consumer IoT, using 3D printing to achieve more design freedom, and more. These aren’t far-off, future technologies; they’re being used today.

As the philosopher Jeremy Bentham put it: “The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.” That seems like an apt description of today’s product development cycle, but he wrote that in 1776. It was, and is, a busy age, but our knowledge is still short of perfection. Until then, we can use technology to minimize and accommodate imperfection to create optimal designs.