Question

The product and services design activity involves five key stages, properly sequenced as follows:

Concept generation.

Concept screening

Preliminary design

Evaluation and improvement

Prototyping and final design

briefly share your views about the above five stages and highlight the one that you feel is more complex based on your opinion.

Answer 1

The product and services design activity involves five key stages, which are explained below in proper sequence -

Concept generation: It is first and most important stage of the product and services design activity. Sometimes the ideas for concept generation are taken from customers by analyzing their requirement or through the competitor’s activity or by the research and development.

Concept screening: After concept generation, concept screening is done by feasibility analysis, its acceptability and benefits and risk factors involved in the process. Concept screening involves gradually reducing the number of possibilities to get a final design.

Preliminary design: A preliminary design is developed based on concept and final accepted design for it which involves various levels of component structure based on design of product and services.

Evaluation and improvement: After developing preliminary design, it is evaluated by various methods which include quality function deployment, value engineering and Taguchi methods. After evaluation the design is improved to final design.

Prototyping and final design: Prototypes of the product and services design are required to test it therefore a model of design is developed either with card models or clay models or with computer simulations. After testing the product and services successfully on this prototyping, it is accepted as final design.

Although all the five key stages involved in product and services design activity are very important but in my opinion prototyping and final design is most complex because it requires a high degree of accuracy from each stage to be successful otherwise the whole process will go for re-evaluation and re-design.