How things are designed these days

I try not to stick up for engineers if I can help it, but in the digital battery thread there was a comment made implying a poor design by the engineer involved. Pete went part way in explaining some of this but there are several issues that contribute to what we the consumer see, and some of them you may not have even realised. (This is based on my years of working in various companies designing and manufacturing products - it should be roughly right but I'm not claiming 100% accuracy)



Back say 100 years ago the chances were that engineering companies were run by engineers (generally pretty good ones) and so while products may not have been exciting they were of a decent quality and did what they were meant to do. Financial returns were modest but (usually) did not fluctuate wildly. In the '60's "professional" managers started appearing and the emphasis changed to maximising return on investment - ie chasing profits. In addition, specifying product went from being done typically by engineers to something likely to have been done by marketing types



In no particular order, some of the issues contributing to "modern" product design -

• Products are not necessarily released when they are ready but to coincide with an event (trade show etc) - that means that sometimes a less than optimal design is used because there is no time left


• Engineers are these days close to the last link in the design chain. Marketing specify what they think the market wants; Industrial Design design the outside and then engineering is left to sort out the details (ie the electronic functional bits). I've worked in a company where the release deadline was set at the start of the project then marketing rejected the styling that ID devised twice (meaning they had to start over), so instead of having 9 months to finish the design, engineering had around 4 as the release date did not change.


• Related to timing issues, there is a great reluctance to "start again". Trying to explain to non-technical managers that you were going up a dead end and needed to scrap 12 month's work and start again is not done. The face saving solution is to patch things up as you go, hoping that miracles are possible. As most engineering design is conservative in nature to deal the with uncertainties in reality you get by but with reduced design margins.


• In an effort to save expensive resources, the design of equipment may not even be done by an engineer. Especially with product that is a copy of something existing in the market (that is, something without radical new technology in it), it may be given to someone who is just told "make one of these". In the case of cheap digital calipers, a draftsperson could have been given a Mitutoyo pair and told to reverse engineer the circuit board. However, one of the things about developing new product properly is learning the tricks involved - so the Mitutoyo engineers may know that the tolerance on a particular component is critical but a copier won't. Result is less than optimal performance.One company making appliances discovered that the optimal control curve is almost but not quite a straight line...


• Related to above, companies go to some length to protect their intellectual property (IP), so people reverse engineering may not always know what it is they are copying. They may guess (and be very close) but will not always be 100% certain. I've seen numbers ground off chips, boards painted with epoxy paint, non-standard materials used, memory chips configured to be wiped if tampered with and so on.


• Cost savings are another thing too. In order to save money some places will annually do a cost down on products - so that the self lubricating plastic used by the engineer to stop hinge noise will be replaced by the purchasing guy with a cheaper non lubricating plastic to save money. I had this once - we saved 3 times the cost of original cost saving by eliminating the extra warranty service calls. What happens if the caliper manufacturer found a cheaper supplier of components? (Of course you rarely get anything for nothing, so the chance is that reliability or other properties are worse)


• Last of all, not all engineers are equal. I've met engineers who are very good at what they do and can be trusted to design a really good product and others who leave you wondering how they got through high school. It will depend on how tight a rein they are kept on too. Most engineers like designing things as best they can and will try to include the features they would expect to see (good battery life for example) but one place I worked at, including things in the product that were not in the spec was a sackable offence. If marketing don't care about battery life then the rest of the organisation is not allowed to either.

Michael