The engineering design process describes how engineers create and validate designs for products, processes and systems across their lifecycle, including manufacture, maintenance and end of life, and has no single standardized form even though many recognizable practices are shared across engineers and companies. It is fundamentally iterative, meaning activities and decisions are often revisited as new information becomes available, and can be understood as a progression through stages, a collaborative social activity, and a systematic application of engineering and basic sciences and mathematics to meet objectives. Core elements include establishing objectives and criteria, synthesis, analysis, construction, testing and evaluation. Common models break the process into stages such as research, conceptualization, feasibility assessment, design requirements, preliminary design, detailed design, production planning and tool design, and production, though simplified and European versions describe fewer, overlapping stages such as problem definition, conceptual design, embodiment design and detail design. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
Facts
Core PrincipleIterative design: activities and decisions are revisited as new information becomes available. 1 FAQs
Do engineers work through the design process in one straight pass?
No. NASA describes design as highly iterative and recursive.
No. NASA's systems engineering handbook describes its system design processes as interdependent, highly iterative and recursive. That means engineers return to earlier work, such as requirements and design choices, as later work shows what needs to change. The repeated passes are meant to end in a validated set of requirements and a design solution that satisfies the stakeholders' expectations.
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1. Engineering design process (Wikipedia)
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the engineering design process is iterative
In Field: Mechanical Engineering, Categories
Mechanical engineering
In Group: Engineering Design and Analysis Methods, Introduction
The engineering design process refers to how engineers create and validate designs for products, processes and systems---including their lifecycle processes such as manufacture, maintenance and end-of-life considerations such as recycling, remanufacture or disposal.
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