A designer generally undertakes the following tasks during a design process?

Question

A designer generally undertakes the following tasks during a design process: Specifies requirements; Generates possible solutions; Evaluates the solutions in terms of performance or other factors. Explain why these tasks are often performed repeatedly in developing a design.

Answer 1

Because who gets it perfect the first time? Every revision causes you to go through the steps again. It's a process of polishing the final design.

Answer 2

Here's an example:

Customer 'A' builds comm satellite busses (the basic electrical and mechanical portions of a communication satellite -- without any transponders). They want to 'beef up' their specs (bandwidth, processing speed, processing power) so they can implement a brand new automatic station-keeping ability (instead of constant human ground control to keep it in-place, in-orbit). So customer 'A' hires space electronics firm 'B' to build that capability.

Firm 'B' decides to use the latest power PC chips, because they are faster and have more computing power than anything currently in space. They put together a system specification and an initial design, but wait... that new whiz-bang power PC is not radiation hardened, nor is IBM planning on making it rad-hard any time soon.

So... it's back to the drawing board -- new specs. new design, etc. etc.

.

Answer 3

This is typically called value engineering. The iterative process is used to find the maximum value for the minimum cost.