A Couple of questions about Design

Design Discussions general design discussion
1

I was just wondering:

1-Are most finished (complete) design CAD work is produced by Mechanical designers or industrial designers/say a company that has 30+ employees?

2-Have you ever been in a situation where the mechanical engineering specs change almost on a daily basis because you are trying to do parallel development and find it hard to design the product because of time constraints?

2

I would say that MOST are finalized by someone who is an expert in mechanical CAD for the discipline of the product (e.g. plastic product development for a plastic enclosure).

That said, I am of the belief that there are 2 phases of CAD development. My company uses pro/e which facilitates this process very well:

Stage 1 Industrial Design “Skeleton”
Creation of the external surfaces to be used for the full product development. It is done by an industrial designer, or at the very least, by a mech designer side by side with an industrial designer

Stage 2 mechanical Design
The mechanical designer shells the design and adds bosses, ribs and all mechanical detailing.


Every single project. It is why I hate a silo-type design process. If an industrial designer doesn’t think about the ramifications of the design on the rest of the product, then the specs will change daily. The same happens in reverse, if mech or marketing, or whoever doesn’t sit next to the designers and learn about the process (or worse, CARE about the process) the product suffers.

The Design Process is an ecosystem. One discipline can’t dominate the others.

3

  1. I work in a company with over 200 employees and do final CAD for all of our plastic parts and many sheet metal parts as well. Mind you, we are a proper manufacturer, so R&D is only 8-10 people.

  2. Every project I’ve ever worked on has had some sort of change mid-development. Sometimes it’s marketing trying to add a killer feature. Sometimes it’s UL testing people that point out some obscure clause in the standards that prohibit part of the concept. Sometimes, it’s engineering changing a mechanical part because their first concept didn’t work. As an IDer, we have to be nimble enough to negociate change.

4

I’ve never worked in a situation were a designer does final CAD work that tooling is cut from. In my experience it has always been a tooling engineer or some form of ME either at the company or vendor level. In most cases, IP’s “2 Stage CAD process” has been used in my experiences.

Specs change all the time, I always see it as an opportunity to check and tweak the design.

5

[quote=“Mr-914”]1. I work in a company with over 200 employees and do final CAD for all of our plastic parts and many sheet metal parts as well. Mind you, we are a proper manufacturer, so R&D is only 8-10 people.

  1. Every project I’ve ever worked on has had some sort of change mid-development. Sometimes it’s marketing trying to add a killer feature. Sometimes it’s UL testing people that point out some obscure clause in the standards that prohibit part of the concept. Sometimes, it’s engineering changing a mechanical part because their first concept didn’t work. As an IDer, we have to be nimble enough to negociate change.[/quote]

How many designers you have in your 8-10 people R&D department? Do you have any ME training? It sounds like most of the design is done by other people.

6

Here ID defines all of the exterior surfaces for the project, 95% of which will go to final tooling unless they need to be modified for some specifically mechanical reason. We’re expected to take in account draft, knife edges, and anything else that might make our design un-manufacturable.

And yes - constraints change all the time. One day an engineer will need a feature to be distance X, the next day they’ll come back and it turns out he meant distance Y - means your geometry needs to be designed in a way that is flexible and easy to work with so those changes can be made as quickly as possible. I harp on this a lot in other threads on how Alias + Pro E is very powerful since it lets you quickly swap out geometry and if done correctly the engineering model will rebuild itself with all the parametric features intact. (Alternatively if it’s done wrong, everyone will complain and the engineer will have to spend days rebuilding everything).

7

our workflow is very similar to this except with UG instead of Pro E. (Still hate UG)

8

R&D: IDers - me. Two draftsmen, three electrical engineers, one programmer, two “mechanics”, one salesman.

I don’t design molds btw, just part design. Big difference.

9

i can just say that my limited experience in work was that the final form (for molds mainly) was generated by the mech but based on the forms and curves which are provided by the design team