190 Decision Based Design
results from the surveys or the customer needs from the product (in case
of a clear order) need to be interpreted and put in a form in which they can
be addressed in a systematic way. Quality function deployment is a way to
encode customer needs and translate them into functional requirements. We
will discuss this in detail in the next section.
In the concept development phase various product design alternatives
are proposed and considered. Recall from Chapter 2 that product design is
often decomposed into design subproblems (DSPs) so that they can be indi-
vidually tackled. This is generally done in a group setting. Brainstorming
is an example of a method used in the concept generation and development
phase. Techn