Design for Community
Welcome to Design for Community. We are a group of engineering faculty and students dedicated to designing, testing, refining, and developing products. Bring us your problem, project, or proposal, and we'll see what we can do to assist you. As engineering students proceed from education to industry, a need to practice what they have learned becomes essential to their productivity. By introducing our students to challenging problems and real-world engineering projects, we aim to prepare our future engineers for the demands and expectations of industry. Design for Community functions as a full-featured engineering design consultancy, simultaneously providing our students the experience they need to succeed and helping you move your product or idea forward.
Design Process
Define
Have a problem? Not sure what the solution is? The first and most important part of the process is to define the problem at hand in order to begin uncovering potential solutions. Here we define our need statement - a short statement that fully defines the problem, the potential users, and the user needs.
Collect Information
Once we know what the problem is we can begin to further understand the problem by collecting information on what has been tried before and gaining insight from the population most affected by the issue at hand.
Brainstorm and Analyze
With experience gathered and the pain of the problem uncovered, we can begin to ideate, brainstorm, and explore possible solutions or paths towards resolvement. From this large pool of ideas and potential solutions, we narrow down to the most practical, realistic, and cost-effective solutions.
Develop
In this stage of the design process we take those preliminary ideas and form multiple design solutions by building models and low-resolution, inexpensive prototypes. By developing simple, cost effective designs early in the process we can gain valuable insight on what the solution may look like, without unnecessary expense.
Gain Feedback
By getting these models and pretotypes in the hands of our users, we can gain feedback on the solution created thus far. Then we can take that feedback and incorporate it into the next iteration of the product or project at hand.
Improve
From the feedback gained from the users we can implement changes to the design and create a product that will serve our original need statement. From here we test the product and repeat the above process until we have the solution that matches client needs.
Still not sure if we can help? Please contact us and check our FAQ section.