Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
5.
The Design Process: How to Get from Nothing to
Something
Amanda Wozniak
“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way
past them into the impossible.”
—Arthur C. Clarke
The creative process can be frustratingly existential. You have an idea for something you
want to produce and the concept of going from idea to object seems straightforward
enough—yet, it's never that simple. Every artist and maker knows the deep effort it takes to
turn an ephemeral idea into that first functional prototype. In most cases, success comes
only after several rounds of failure, backtracking, and reconsideration in a near-continuous
cycle of elation and despair. But once you finally hold an object in your hands that does
what you've designed it to do, the thrill is unparalleled.
Creative iteration is just one small step in making, producing, and shipping hardware. In
full-scale product development, there are so many logistics to handle that if we were to
design hardware in the purely creative mode, we would never be able to ship product. Even
after the design is done, that's just the beginning. Consider the effort it takes for you to
make one thing well, and now imagine that you're trying to make 100, 1000, or 10,000
things in the exact same way. You should feel a little panicked and overwhelmed. The key
lesson here is that it can be impossible to support full-scale production if you don't care-
fully consider the process by which you're making that object (or 10,000 copies). A good
process can also help you with more than just volume production. The challenges of system
design become similarly difficult and impractical to manage when you—the maker—are
trying to push your designs from making simple components to ever larger and more com-
plex projects. You need tools to manage an engineering project (or commercial art busi-
ness) if you want to succeed.
Managing that exponentially increasing creative effort is where the engineering design
process comes in. Most large-scale projects employ some process, so you may have heard
some of this jargon before. For example, “Agile” is a popular software development philo-
sophy, and the most common hardware design process is a “waterfall” workflow. Either
way, engineering best practices are just a formal way of breaking down a project into
phases and tasks so that complexity and production become manageable. In addition to set-
