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Sustainability


experience with previous models. This was highlighted by a company making sewage treatment equipment. “Staff can easily go from the factory to the design office to report difficulties such as the product being too difficult to put together or modify. Meetings are held regularly with company service engineers from all over the country. They report directly on problems with the products operating in the field. Such problems might include difficulties taking equipment apart or things that don’t work. There is very close cooperation between design, production and the end-user. The design manager also regularly takes the opportunity to accompany the salesmen and service engineers and visit end-users. Comments from the various concerned parties are addressed in the design of future products.”


In another example of information transfer, a boiler engineer explained: “One of the parts of BS 8887-1 was used with the sales department who were requesting some new product development work. The senior design engineer asked for information


relating to the product brief in order to fully understand it. The requested information was based on a list from Section 5: design brief (Table 1 on page 6 of BS 8887-1). This included market need, opportunity, price, potential for ongoing development and time scale, thus covering all of the ‘parameters for consideration in the preparation of a design brief’. Effort is made to identify opportunities and consumer needs through user involvement, so users help design the products.”


The challenge of information transfer can be problematic and expensive when late changes occur. The following opinion was typical: “It can be frustrating that once the design process has started and an accurate technical specification has been arrived at, the design requirements may change following the first iteration of a product. Very often other demands will grow out of that. One of the things that the company suffers from is the people who work in the sales department and many of the customers are ignorant of the engineering possibilities. Design tends to be a fairly organic process


Figure 3: Design activity model – adapted from Rhodes and Smith, (1987)6 in Pugh, (1990)7 CORE PHASES


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EXPERIMENTS CREATIVITY PATENTS EVALUATION


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COMPONENTS COMMUNICATION S A INFORMATION TRANSFER L E 19 I L D U F A C E P T INFORMATION TECHNIQUES A MARKET ANALYSIS I F I C R K


and it needs to remain flexible right up to the prototyping stage. Frequently there will be changes, sometimes fundamental changes, in the components of a specification right up to the point where the first production prototypes are built and field trialled with customers. Often there will be feedback from that because there were unforeseen issues.”


The bottom line EoL processing is starting to gain recognition. However, the financial implications of adopting such processes can be an obstacle when the activity is not profitable, as commented on by an auto parts firm: “A good product should not die because it can’t be recycled. In some instances recycling could cost as much as the product itself.” From the perspective of a designer concerned with environmental impact, BS 8887-1 Annex C is especially useful as it can be directly applied to product development and appears almost as a checklist. However one interviewee commented: “The recommendations in Annex C should be considered alongside the requirements relating to performance, commercial viability


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INFORMATION TRANSFER


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