Activity: Design Process

How well do you know the design process? Match the actions of an engineer who is designing a solution for patients with whole-mouth tooth loss to the appropriate stage of the design process below. Click/tap on each item to select it, then on the box below the appropriate stage to place it.

Based on user feedback, update the design to a wider variety of tooth shapes and sizes to more closely match the look of natural teeth.
Observe patients testing whether the dentures allow them to eat crunchy foods, and coordinate long-term wear studies with a subset of patients.
Interview patients with tooth loss, and identify that they struggle to chew crunchy foods such as carrots and celery.
Draft details about the individual components needed for the solution and 3D print models of the best designs that can withstand the needed bite force.
Specify that the solution must be resistant to breaking or chipping and able to withstand a bite force of 165 pounds per square inch, and then sketch potential implant-supported denture solutions.
Determine which type of denture is most likely to withstand biting forces without breaking or chipping, and document the final design.
User Needs
Design Input
Build Process
Design Output
Validation
Iteration

Feedback: An engineer starts the design process by gathering information about the user's needs to understand the primary problem. In the design input stage, engineers identify the most important design requirements for a potential solution by translating user needs into qualitative and quantitative specifications. Then, during the build process, the engineer prototypes the functional model of the best solution after mapping out all the necessary components for the design.

By continuing to adhere to the priority specifications, an engineer then moves into the design output stage of actually selecting and documenting the superior prototype, which will then be tested by users during the validation stage. Long and short-term testing can provide engineers with differing feedback, so the final stage of iteration could repeat multiple times as an engineer hones the final solution.