Exploring the Design Space and Optimizing the Design

In this course, we emphasize that the product concept you started with may not be the best design idea to meet all of the requirements that you have identified. During this step of Getting Design Right, the focus is on exploring the design space to discover other concepts and on optimizing the design.

The first two courses in this series used the example of a toy catapult to illustrate the steps in the design process. This course extends the example of the toy catapult to illustrate the steps involved in exploring and optimizing the product's design: clarifying requirements, analyzing functionality, generating a collection of creative product ideas, refining those ideas to create new solutions, and ultimately selecting the best idea for production.

This course covers a process for generating ideas, putting them together into different integrated design concepts, and then selecting the best one. This step takes time and effort, but it is small compared to the time and effort you will spend on detailed design, build, and test once you commit to a design idea.

The benefits of exploring the design space typically far outweigh the investment in time and effort. These benefits come in the form of a better match to customer needs, lower cost, better foresight of design implications, and better design-­‐team interactions. You will be able to use this approach on the job at your next problem-­solving meeting.