Stepping from Ideation to Preliminary Designs

The engineer is now ready to move from ideation to preliminary designs. This is the heart of the design process, and it is the phase that relies most on experience and engineering judgment. Here, unworkable ideas are discarded, and promising ideas are molded and modified to form workable plans and designs. 

This step may require many decisions to be made about alternative layouts, configurations, materials, dimensions, and other specifications. Conceptual sketches may need to be drawn preliminary plans may need to be prepared and thought may need to be given to material specifications. 

Preliminary designs may evolve through analysis or synthesis. Analysis involves the separation of a whole into constituents for individual study. Synthesis involves combining facts, principles, or laws into a whole idea that will accomplish some desired result or solve a problem. 

In this phase, it is necessary to subject possible solution ideas to careful scrutiny. Possible solutions are carefully and critically examined and studied. There are many ways that this can be done. In certain instances, preliminary sketching of a device or casual analysis of a process will show that an idea is not worthy of further consideration. In other cases, a component may need to be examined by laboratory tests. In still other instances, a formal and comprehensive research program may need to be undertaken to examine the validity of a hypothesis or the efficacy of a proposed solution. 

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Stepping from ideation to preliminary designs (including modeling). 

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