Product Design

The Concept of Product Design
Adherbal Caminada Netto
University of São Paulo
adherbal@usp.brr

Paulo Carlos Kaminski
University of São Paulo
pckamins@usp.br

Abstract: This paper addresses the fact that design and project, although related, are not conceptually identical. It is pointed out that nowadays both terms are loosely employed even in technical
and scientific environments, andthat in the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil this fact is made
worse by confusions created when translating from English texts. In order to make their point, the
authors lead the reader through a brief account of the recent evolution of definitions for both terms
in national and international standards related to quality. Finally, it is remarked that both terms
stand at the same level whenrelated to the concept of process.
Key Words: Product design and development, Project, Quality Standards.
1. Introduction

The words project and design are nowadays quite frequently
used in every day language with a somewhat loose meaning,
even in technical and scientific environments. Therefore,
although it may be regrettable to loose all the emotional wealth
contained in phrases such aslife project or even research
project, by the very reason that they have broad meanings
and are not precise, it seems often advisable to define as
precisely as possible what one means by product design.
Having been involved with the application and evolution
of Quality principles and concepts for the last twenty years,
one of the authors had the opportunity to follow the great
effort whichwas developed in order to arrive at definitions
such as those shown in Figure 1. Particularly during the
RIO’97 meeting of the ISO Technical Committee 176 ¾
held in November 1997 in the city of Rio de Janeiro and
closed in the Parliament of Latin America in the city of São

Paulo, Brazil ¾ he had the chance to witness the international
community’s accentuated preoccupation with the need tocome up with definitions that not only would be acceptable
to all concerned parties, but also could be consistently
translated into the several languages spoken in some 150
countries interested in the drafts which, three years later,
would become what we now know as the ISO 9000:2000
series of standards (ISO, 2000).
2. The Evolution of Concepts

The difficulty in obtaining gooddefinitions ¾ which
includes the very perception of the necessity and convenience
of definitions ¾ in a field of knowledge such as Quality
Engineering and Management, which has been evolving in
a unceasing and accelerated way for the last thirty years,
can be exemplified by the recent evolution of the definitions
of design and project within the ISO standards related to
quality. Thus ISO 8402 (ISO,1994), which was probably

Figure 1: Concepts relating to process and product.. Source: ISO 9000:2000 (ISO, 2000).
Vol.2 nº 2 March 2004

Product: Management & Development

73

the terminology standard most widely used by quality
professionals since its publication in 1994, until it was
superseded by ISO 9000:2000 (ISO, 2000), simply did not
contemplate such terms, although itcontained the definition
of “design review” since this was one of the requirements
included in the contemporary certification standards.
Before the publication of the aforesaid ISO 8402
Standard it was necessary to refer to national standards or
glossaries in order to check what was meant by the terms
under consideration. Particularly important were those texts
published by the American Societyfort Quality Control ASQC1 (1987), both because they divulged the terminology
contained in the ANSI/ASQC standards (1987) and due to
their international repercussions. It is easy to perceive,
however, that what was taking place in the international
arena was eventually bound to influence national standards.
As an example thereof one verifies that the 1979 edition of
British Standard BS 4778...