I recently posed the following question on Quora
What are the most frequent false beliefs in mechanical engineering and product design?
I find the answers compelling and hope you do as well.
- Design doesn’t depend on context
- The designer knows more about the user than the user does
- The idea is the hard part
- The “light-bulb!” theory of idea generation
- The “lone genius” fallacy
- It will work the first time
- Everything you learned in school is important
- Nothing you learned in school is important
- If it looks good in CAD, it is good.
- All manufacturers are the same
- Electical > Mechanical
- Gut > Math
- Once a prototype works, getting to production is easy
- Prototyping is easy
And some of my own…
- Prototyping is unneccessary
- Prototyping isn’t worth it.
- That anything is truly off the table. (On more occasions than you might think, one person at the client will claim a certain feature or date is sacrosanct, only to be overrun by someone else at the client in order that the product needs to have this other feature or hit some other date). Use “off the table” with discretion.
- That decisions should be made NOW (making decisions as late as possible (although not later) means you make them at the point when you have the most knowledge about the project.)
- That Finite Element Analysis doesn’t need to be coupled with physical testing
Add yours in the comments.
Related posts:
- how to design a product
- Thoreau on perfect product design
- flow in product design (with music to get you there)
Article by chris loughnane
Chris is Design Engineer + Sustainability Advocate at a Boston area design consultancy and has written 134 sweet posts for the Product Development Notebook.
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