Clause 7.3.2 Design and development input

The human mind cannot create anything. It produces nothing until after having been fertilized by experience and meditation; its acquisitions are the gems of its production.

George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
Leading European naturalist (1707-1788)  

In every design and development process, simple or complex, it is crucial to know what is required. The design and development input is defined by all requirements that the design must meet in order to be successful. In other words, it should be clear how the final product is going to look, and which conditions must be fulfilled.

For example:

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  A chef will need to consider the characteristics of the meal that he/she is going to design: type of meal, taste, type of ingredients, size etc.


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  Before designing prosthesis for a patient, a dentist will need to gather information about the patient and assess his/her preferences.


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  A designer of customized oil field equipment will need to have detailed information about application, dimensions, materials, tolerances, etc.

Design inputs should include:

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  functional and performance requirements


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  applicable statutory and regulatory requirements


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  where, applicable, information derived from previous similar designs, and


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  other requirements essential for design and development
  Standard requires you to review Design and development inputs for adequacy, completeness, ambiguity and conflict among various inputs.

A Case of insufficient design inputs or improper design reviews

We are using mobile phones and many of us have stopped using wrist watch and use mobile phone to check time instead.
You set the time on the display, but when you take phone but you are not able to see the time (See Photo A).
The reason is that the cell phone has a keypad lock feature which keeps buttons from accidentally being pressed. When the phone is not in direct light and you want to see what time, you can not easily read the display.

To see the time you need to have back light on, you press a key, the display will light up (See Photo B.)
Unfortunately, this also brings up a message "Press Menu then * to lock or unlock keypad".
Finally you unlock the key pad and see the time and you check the time rather very frequently and loose valuable time and energy.

Reasons:

1. 
   
   The software designer was not given sufficient design inputs. One of the design input that user will need to check time very frequently is not considered.


2. 
   
   Or it may be that "key pad locking" requirement is added as a modification after customer complaints regarding "Pocket Calls" that is calls made while phone was in the pocket.


3. 
   
   Conflict between to design inputs was not resolved.


4. 
   
   Even the message that appears is unnecessarily long, remember that phone keypad is already locked and now user has to unlock it still the message says "Press Menu then * to lock or unlock keypad" it should be simply "Press Menu then * to unlock keypad" or "Press Menu then * to unlock".

Solution:

Considering new requirements, display can be modified as given in the right side (see Photo D). The time is displayed at the top and an appropriate message is also displayed below it.
Note: Recent models from various mobile phone vendors have good software and display time directly. The images displayed are for illustration only.

Now a Case of Excessive Design and Development Input

We are use word processors, like Microsoft Word, and perform horizontal alignment. Normally we get following options:

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  Align Left


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  Align Right


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  Center


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  Justify (Full)


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  Force Justify (Force Full)

In addition to these standard five options CorelDraw (after version 9.0) has one more option "None" (see Figure).

Corel Draw Help does not have any information of this except one line.........

If characters have not been shifted horizontally, applying no alignment produces the same result as applying left alignment.
Applying none, some time results in unexpected results and text never gets aligned properly even if other alignment is used afterwards. Desktop Publishing experts do not no what it is all about, neither Corel Corporation has responded with any firm reply to their queries.

This is a feature having no practical use. 

External Document Reference: Documentation Kit

Methodology for Product Design and Development
Design and Development Plan/Review Record