205Product Development andSystems Engineering
of the product (e.g., the needs statements above), and the output is a set of
candidate designs (not just one) that can potentially fulll these require-
ments. The candidate designs are then rened/evaluated and the best ones
selected. Notice that brainstorming, which we discussed earlier, forms only
a part of the concept generation process.
As we have mentioned earlier, a decomposition-based approach to concept
generation is advocated in product design. This is done primarily because
most engineering problems are too complex to solve in a single step. The
design problem is divided up into multiple subproblems, and the subprob-
lems in turn are tackled separately. Ulrich and Eppinger (1999) pres ...