Quote:
Originally Posted by mr henderson
I would suggest the OP, and anyone else who fancies becoming a manufacturer, thinks about what products are difficult for an amateur, as a one-off, to make, then think about what price that amateur might be prepared to pay, to do some sums as to what the raw materials and parts might cost and THEN go to the drawing board, or computer, and do the design.
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Strictly speaking, you are absolutely right.
And i am referring to QFD, the initials of "Quality Function Deployment". That was a new product development technique, and started at Mitsubishi's facturi at Kobe (Japan) in 1972.
What is QFD? In a few words, it's a plan, which takes into consideration the customer need and drives the product development in a way to fulfill these requirements in order to produce a cheap and adequate product, a succesful product. Nothing is made or planned which does not relates to customer needs covering.
If we take a look at today's "market rules" we will see that that product development does not follow the QFD route very precisely. We see that we have passed from the era of "needs covering" to the era of "needs creation". Mobile phones are a good example. Thousands of operations, games, software, high quality cameras embedded and a lot more. If we turn 10 years back, noone would need a camera in his mobile phone. But the marketing people, just wanting to offer something new and radical, added a lot of features to the mobile phones. And people has replied positively. And they paid the mobiles phones which were expensive. I think most people (including myself) are using their mobile phones up to 30% of their total features.
I dont mean that i am creating new needs to Roadster builders. What i want to point out is that a designer should not only think what the customer need to have, they also have to think ahead of this and offer something more, something new. This is the game of evolution. If automobile manifacturers were thinking like that, we would still be driving cars without air-conditioning or without ABS. And remember,
you only need ABS as soon as you try it.