You just finished the initial design of your product, and it looks great! Well, it looks great on your computer screen. So, you decide to make a prototype and see if your design looks and works as intended in real life. Odds are that the first prototype won’t meet all of your expectations. In fact, […]

More than 3.2 million product designers and engineers use SOLIDWORKS worldwide. Fun fact: SOLIDWORKS crashed on me during a final exam once and my professor was not sympathetic — instead he decided to teach me a lesson in saving files more frequently. That lesson still haunts me over a decade later. Pro-tip: Always follow SOLIDWORKS […]

The Product Requirements Document (PRD aka Product Requirement Document) is a familiar term to most engineers. Typically, we get the PRD from a product manager; it tells us what to build but not how to build it. But let’s face it, it’s probably better that way. Engineers hate being told how to implement an idea — that’s the fun […]

Note: This article is based on a previously published version by Sylvia Wu and has been updated to reflect Fictiv’s current capabilities, as well as 2022 innovations. When designing a product for the consumer market, industrial usage, or aerospace industry, how the product looks, feels, and functions is critical. Color, material and finish (CMF) are […]

In the product design world, it’s common to use a tool called a Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) to improve a design or process. FMEAs are commonly separated into two different categories, depending on their application: A Design FMEA (D-FMEA) is used in product design to identify possible design weaknesses and failure modes. A […]

Any professional mechanical engineer knows that Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is an essential tool used to analyze stress (deflection, FOS, and more) in a design based on different loading conditions. A huge part of conducting FEA centers around research. When you start the process, you don’t yet know what you don’t know. You need to […]