A product risk assessment is carried out at this stage. In our experience from the med-tech industry a risk assessment may narrow your freedom of design, but this is because riskier design paths would be filtered out. The risk assessment also captures all perceived risks at that moment in time and how the risk will be managed. The outcome from the Risk Assessment is fed back into the Project Brief.

Constraints by the engineering content of the product may have an influence on the conceptual form and preliminary engineering constraints are designed in, in addition to predefined mechanical components such as mechanical or electronic devices, populated circuits,  fans, cooling fins, fixation devices (screws). From this data, we can calculate the mass of the product and even calculate the centre of gravity of the concept device.

During the design engineering phase, questions are often raised that are fairly easy to answer, however some questions are less easy to answer and it is useful to have a physical Proof of Concept model. With our in house CNC milling of blue machineable wax a proof of concept model can be generated with very short lead times and zero lag times.

As the proof of concept models are tangible, handling feedback can also be obtained. There is still scope for design freedom , further model iterations can be machined.