Design Specification

A design specification is a list of requirements that a product must meet. The design specification is written by producing a summary of all of the most important information you have analysed during your research (Summary of Research). A design specification is detailed information that guides a designer’s thinking about what is to be designed. It is used to help generate, test and evaluate design ideas and to help develop a manufacturing specification later in your project.

Your design specification needs to take into account designing for manufacture – where considerations for design should include the purpose, function, aesthetic and performance requirements of the product; materials, components or systems; market and user requirements; environmental concerns; energy implications; any values issues that may influence your design ideas and considerations about manufacturing processes, technology, scale of production; quality and safety issues; time, resource and cost constraints.

Your design specification should include measurable characteristics (be able to test against it) that will help you design with manufacture in mind. It needs to include enough detail to develop feasible design ideas that you could possibly make, but leave room for creativity. Your specification should be listed as bullet points, ideally in sub-sections, and should number about 15 - 20 clear, relevant points. Each point (ideally) should have some explanation or rationale as to why it is important i.e. Don’t just write a very short bullet point ensure that you explain why. A poor example (A) would be ‘It must have no sharp edges’; a better example (B) of the same statement would be ‘I must consider designing ideas without sharp edges as the user of the lantern may harm their hand when holding or repositioning the lantern inside the tent’. Example B goes into the detail of why the product should not have any sharp edges and it is this additional information that achieves a higher grade!

Use the following checklist to help develop your product design specification.

These could also be titles of sub-sections when writing your specification:

·       The products purpose, function and aesthetics

·       User requirements and needs

·       The expected performance requirements of the product, materials and components

·       The kind of processes, technology and scale of production you may use

·       Any value issues that may influence your design, such as cultural, social, sustainable or environmental concerns

·       The use of renewable energy or materials

·       Any quality control and safety procedures that will constrain your design

·       Time, resource and cost constraints you will have to meet

Your design specification should guide all your design thinking and provide you with a starting point for generating design ideas. Your specification can change during the course of a project and develop as research is carried out, often starting as an outline specification until the final design or manufacturing specification is reached. This is used as a check when testing and evaluating design ideas and provides information about the solution that can help to monitor its quality of design. The design specification is an essential document that sets up the criteria for the design and development of your product and will be used at the end of your project for your Evaluation. 

Therefore, it is worth triple marks because if you do not have a good one you will lose marks for your Research, marks for your Design work and marks for your Evaluation!