Preliminary Report (Feb. 2nd)

• Introduction - The real-world problem

  The need for the design work is explained and justified. Typical questions to be addressed are:

  • Motivation: Why is this an important problem? Who will benefit from the resulting design? Who might be negatively affected?
  • Identify users and buyers: What is the market for the proposed product? Do you have a vision of your customer?
  • Assumptions: What are the (physical, technical, regulatory, social) assumptions that constrain you solution space?

• Review of the current state-of-the-art solutions

  Here you review previous designs to establish the present state-of-the-art. Patents, competing products, similar products for other markets should be discussed. You need to know the state of the art to define the problem, and knowing about existing designs gives you ideas for your own conceptual design. As all the desired information may not be available to you at this time, this section lists also any additional information needed and how it may be obtained.

  A concluding paragraph should summarize the “design gap”, namely, the need for the proposed design work based on the preceding state of the art review and the capabilities of the competition: what you set out to do is justified because not only it is desirable but also because no one else has developed a design solution, i.e., why is your design unique.

  A product positioning chart with two or three key attributes and associated values should be included to illustrate the design gap and establish the “market niche” for the intended product.

• Design Attributes and Variables

  This section takes the needs and wants for the project and translates them into actionable items. The following items must be included:

  • A short, concise design problem statement
  • A list of all design attributes with a short explanation for each one. You must include at least one specific business attribute, such as price, cost, investment cap, or return on investment. You must also include at least one user-oriented attribute, i.e., a design attribute that would make users select this design among other alternatives.
  • Make a design variable list and explain each one, and the mapping from variables to attributes.
  • A list of objectives and requirements derived from the list of variables that you will use to measure success of the design developed during the project. Include target values for the requirements and justify them.

At completion of the project, these objectives and requirements will serve as a yardstick of successful completion of the design task. Objectives may have to be revised at a later time, when more information may be available. However, any later modification of objectives must be clearly justified. In setting the objectives one should always consider resources (what is needed to succeed), possible solutions (how well they may work), and the design to manufacturing transformation (what can be actually fabricated).

• The length of this report should be about 5 pages plus appendices.
• Please submit your report to yiren@asu.edu, in pdf or markdown format.