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”