Design and Production

10.           Design and Production

Design means many different things to different folks. To a clothes designer, it means sketching styles that might appeal to their target market. To a car designer or aircraft designer, it means (nowadays) building a model on a computer that can be evaluated for strength, speed and efficiency by using simulation tools. More and more, design methods are involving computers, for electronics, cars, buildings, and yes, even clothes.

Computers are not being used because they are good at designing things. In fact, they are pretty useless – as yet. Virtually all of the creative design comes from the person using the computer. What the computer is good at is storing the design in great detail, analysing it in various ways, and producing data for machines that can automatically produce the finished product when the design is complete.

People have always used models for designing, either in the form of drawings and sketches, to fabricated prototypes built using anything from string and sealing wax to steel and cement. The point of building models is that they can be used to test ideas, and gain feedback. That’s the old kind of feedback that everyone understands – comments from potential users, from marketing staff, or from production engineers, or anyone else who might have an input to the design process.

Software designers have found a new way of getting feedback – it is difficult (though not impossible) to model software. Instead, new software systems are produced in Beta form and distributed to selected potential customers for them to try and give feedback. A more cynical view of this process is that is product testing by users rather than by designers. Very early (and hence possibly problematic) Alpha systems are sometimes used in this way. Alpha and Beta prototypes have been used for a long time in engineering, where they represent early ‘hand crafted’ models made in the design and development departments, before being refined into something that can be built in mass production departments.

There is a big difference in designing and making something that works, and something that can be repeatedly produced with the right quality and price. Production engineers will often be pretty scornful of the efforts of the development department; ‘how do you expect us to produce that’ is not uncommon. So there is feedback all the way through the process; in fact continuous feedback is necessary for continuous product improvement.

In the actual production, monitoring and feedback is used to keep the product line quality acceptable. Products can be tested for dimensions, weight, colour and any other important characteristics so that any deviation from the desired standard can be fed back to the production method to adjust and correct.

One of the neatest examples of this can be found in the manufacture of metal balls, as found for example in ball bearings. These can be bounced off a number of flat surfaces into a final collecting bin. If the ball deviates from being accurately round, it will not bounce correctly, and will thus automatically end up in a ‘scrap’ collector rather than the collecting bin. The feedback and selection is achieved here by the product itself, rather than any complex measuring equipment.