Design Methods in Engineering and Product Design

Citation

Rigelsford, J. (2000), "Design Methods in Engineering and Product Design", Assembly Automation, Vol. 20 No. 1, pp. 86-87. https://doi.org/10.1108/aa.2000.20.1.86.1

Design Methods in Engineering and Product Design is a well‐written text which contains plenty of useful illustrations. The book can be used as an introduction to common industrial design methods for practising designers and engineers but is aimed at undergraduate students on engineering and design‐related courses.

Chapter 1 introduces the product design process (PDP), with chapters 2 and 3 addressing Interfaces with design, and Organisation and teamwork, respectively. The following three chapters cover topics related to defining the product and its specifications, namely Market research methods, Requirement trees and Product design specifications.

Chapter 7, Creativity methods, covers brainstorming, mindmapping and morphology charts. Evaluation and selection methods, and Market and technology risk analysis are discussed in the following two chapters, while chapter ten addresses Value analysis and engineering. In this chapter there is a well‐written short section on the application of Boolean algebra to fault trees, which may challenge readers from a non‐engineering based background.

Failure modes and Fault trees are further discussed in chapter 11, with Quality function deployment being the final topic discussed in the book. Model answers can be found in the Appendix for all of the assignment questions in the text.