SIMPLIFIED: "Understanding the engineering design process"

Link to article: https://dovetail.com/product-development/engineering-design-process/ 

Note: The image above was taken from: https://hartzleruniversity.weebly.com/11-design-basics.html

The article linked above talks about the engineering design process. In my personal opinion, the engineering design process is one of the most important concepts and ideas to understand if you want to be an engineer because it essentially acts as an outline for all projects. 

There are various engineering design processes online, but they are all pretty similar. This article lists the design process as follows: define the problem, research, imagine solutions, plan, develop a prototype, test, make improvements, and share results.

These can be simplified to six steps: define the problem, research, develop a solution, build the solution, test the solution, and present the solution. When defining the problem, you want to identify stakeholders and write out your problem statement. What are you going to do? What are you trying to solve? Who is this going to affect? At the research stage, you want to think of potential solutions. You can then create a decision matrix to compare various ideas and weigh them against each other. We have another simplified article on decision matrixes on this website if you want to learn more about that. At the develop a solution stage, I recommend making a CAD model. You want to have some sort of sketches or digital prototype that will allow you to have a guide when constructing the solution. The next two steps are pretty self explanatory: for the build the solution step, you want to obviously construct your prototype, and at the test the solution stage, you want to test it. 

The engineering design process is iterative. This means that you can be at one stage and then return to a previous stage. For instance, after testing, you might see that your prototype doesn’t work. This may force you to return to the research stage. Ultimately, when your prototype has passed all of your tests, you want to present your solution and share your results to the stakeholders and some people that might be affected by your prototype.