Transcript for:
Understanding Criteria and Constraints in Design

Ok welcome everyone to the engineering design process in the last video we covered the design statement and defining your problem what we are going to be moving onto now is the next step once you have researched your problem it is time to move onto defining your criteria and constraints Criteria and constraints the criteria is what you want your design to be able to do or what its purpose is your constraints are going to be your rules or limitations what is going to be limiting you and what you can and can't do. now, this is essential in getting your design right. If you don't know what your criteria and constraints are you are going to have an issue when it comes to actually building your product so your criteia once again is going to be what you want to doand your constaints are going to be limits or rules what you are going to be limited by the more time you spend defing these two areas the more you are going to be able to focus on your design and keep your ideas realistic if you are having a hard time doing this or focusing on this what you can do is think about a procuct so what you can do is go back to the problem from the previous video on the pet carrier lets get some criteria and constraints for that project so our design statement on that on was to design and constuct a carrier for a pet that will safely bring your pet to the vet so criteria for what you want it to do would be safely transport your pet another critera for that might be how long is your pet going to be in there they might need food might need water also when your thinking about that when you have an animal such as a turlte or any other animal that breaths its going to need air one of those thing could be easily forgotten for instance if you have a fish it wont need air its going to need to be a sealed container with water if you have a turtle its going to need air so constraints might be your materials so for instance once you start talking about materials you may have things like cardboard you might have wood and it could be metal it all depend on the material that you are going to haver at hand so if you were making this design statement and you researched your product that you are going to be doing you would start reseaching what materials you are going to need to acoomplish that you you would get them so thaths going to be a constriant it could be time so you might only have a certain amount of time to build it so lets say you needed to get your pet to the vet by 4 oclock because thats when they are going to close so you need to know time and how long it will take another one might be cost you need to know how much its goint to cost to build this you dont want to start getting unrealistic and start saying you are going to make your carrier out of gold because not not going to spend that much just to take your pet to the vet think about how much money your going to spend on creating this so having the idea of your constraints and criteria is going to help you in getting to the next step of the design process what we are going to talk about next is the brain storming process once you start brainstorming your ideas you need to think abiut your problem your research you did and your criteria what you want your design to do what it has to do and then your constraints whats going to be your limit so what material your going to be making it out of how time do you have to build it how much is it going to cost to build