Design Methods for "Demonstration" Assignment

The guidelines below offer suggestions, but realize that the methods naturally overlap and must be applied in some unified manner in order to achieve the best overall design refinement.

Heuristics

At a minimum, show use of Pareto analysis and identify/evaluate any significant uses of rules-of-thumb, standard design practices, and design checklists.  You may also want to consider the use of other heuristics (for example those for project management or controlling risks).

Value Engineering

Follow and document some semi-formal process to simplify and improve your design through a value engineering approach. This should include some analysis of function and an attempt to improve value, likely through an application of the questions and guidelines for value engineering.

Design for Safety

1. List all significant dangers associated with all operating modes of the system. This list should correlate with FMEA max severity items.

2. Address (with corrective actions completed or planned) all significant dangers. Danger avoidance is always the goal, but is not always possible. In those cases please indicate why avoidance is unattainable (i.e. not feasible, not cost effective, not necessary due to the low level of danger, ...) and provide adequate protection, not just warnings. Warnings can be used as supplements to protection, but not in place of protection.

Use of testing and mock-ups

Describe how simple mock-ups and well-designed tests were used to answer specific design questions and to validate performance predictions and other operational characteristics.