essay assignment
Notes
Design Assignment
Pairwise Comparison Charts
• Help us understand the relative importance of design goals. !
• They can be used to help indicate the collective preferences of a design team.
FIGURE 4.6 A Pairwise-Comparison Chart for the beverage container project.
Morphological Charts
Provide another way to visualize elements in a design space.
‣ They give us a sense of the overall size of the design space while allowing us to identify potential solutions.
• What features do we want the design to have? OR
• What functions do we want the design to perform?
• Build a list of the means!
Means Feature/Function
1 2 3 4 5 6
Contain beverage can bottle bag box
Material for drink container aluminum plastic glass
waxed cardboard
lined cardboard
mylar films
Mechanism to provide access to juice pull tab
inserted straw twist top
tear corner
unfolded container zipper
Display of product information
shape of container labels
color of material
Sequence manufacture of juice / container concurrent serial
Figure 5.2 (a)
Numerical Evaluation Matrices
These charts assign numerical values to the features of a design that indicate the importance of specific features.
‣ Objectives are assigned a weighted importance out of 100%.
‣ Design options are assigned a relative multiplier for each objective, and the two values are multiplied to determine the overall significance.
Numerical Evaluation Matrix
Figure 5.8: Numerical evaluation matrix for the beverage container problem.
New Beverage Container PCC
Goals Environ. Benign Easy to
Distribute Preserve
Taste Appeals to
Parents Market
Flexibility Brand ID Score
Environ. Benign *** 1 1 1 1 1 5
Easy to Distribute 0 *** 0 0 1 0 1
Preserve Taste 0 1 *** 1 1 1 4
Appeals to Parents 0 1 0 *** 1 1 3
Market Flexibility 0 0 0 0 *** 0 0
Brand ID 0 1 0 0 1 *** 2
Figure 3.4b
Numerical Evaluation Matrix
Goals Weight % Glass bottle with twist-
off cap Aluminum can with pull-tab
Polyethylene bottle with
twist-off cap Mylar bag with straw
C: No sharp edges X X
C: No toxin release
C: Preserves quality
O: Environmentally benign (5) 33 0.9 x 33% 29.7%
0.1 x 33% 3.3%
O: Easy to distribute (1) 9 0.5 x 9% 4.5%
0.6 x 9% 5.4%
O: Preserves taste (4) 22 0.9 x 22% 19.8%
1.0 x 22% 22.0%
O: Appeals to parents (3) 18 0.8 x 18% 14.4%
0.5 x 18% 9.0%
O: Permits marketing flex. (0) 4 0.5 x 4% 2.0%
0.5 x 4% 2.0%
O: Generate brand identity (2) 13 0.2 x 13% 2.6%
1.0 x 13% 13.0%
TOTALS 99 73% 54.7%
Types of Functions
Basic Functions !
‣ The specific work that a project, process, or procedure is designed to accomplish.
Secondary Functions !
‣ Any other functions needed to do the basic function, or those that result from doing the basic function.
‣ Can be “Required” or “Unwanted”