New Product Engineering: The Quality Paradox

While techniques such as quality function deployment allow engineers to relate product and process changes to customer requirements, they have their principal benefits in reflecting incremental rather than step changes in a design. Indeed, during the concept design phase of innovative product engineering, it is particularly difficult to formulate methodologies which will provide quality control mechanisms without placing undesirable constraints upon the conceptualization processes. This is something of a paradox, because it is precisely during this phase that the most important quality decisions are made. The changing nature of information during the conceptualization phases, the rapid growth of information content and the nature of information processing are all factors which make quality control difficult. This paper describes the early stages of a research programme aimed at solving some of the problems associated with the control of quality during the concept design phase.