<aside> 🚩 A Morphological Chart is a diagrammatic technique to catalog and help evaluate combinations of alternative system elements.

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• ON THIS PAGE

Overview

A Morphological Chart (MC) is a way to document all possible embodiments for a group of functions. MCs are information-dense, so they provide excellent overviews of all available embodiments when developing Design Concepts. MCs also make it easier to ensure that the embodiments are as diverse as possible, which helps developing creative designs.

Morphological Charts are also used outside engineering:

• choosing the best embodiments for a set of subsystem requirements in a design;
• choosing the best activities to do on a vacation for a set of goals that define a “great vacation;” and
• choosing the best combination of investments that address your diverse financial needs.

One example of a MC is shown to the right.

A MC contains one row for each function Requirement. The items in each row are the embodiments for that function.

Each embodiment should be described with a rough, possibly abstract, hand-drawn sketch and a very short text label. Software tools may be used to create the sketches, but they must not be images of real-world objects.

A morphological chart for an infrared imaging system from Stanford University. This chart captures 225 concepts.

Generating Morphological Charts

Given a set of Requirements, each team member conceives of as many embodiments as possible per the Propose Stage (see Design Concept for details).

Then, the team collaboratively creates a single MC, containing all the unique embodiments that the team agrees are potentially reasonable ways to embody each function.

Once you've completed the first pass through constructing the morphological chart, revisit it with your teammates.

• Are you sure that each embodiment is separate from every other embodiment for a given function?
• Are there any duplicates or near duplicates? If there are, remove the duplicates.
• Is anything missing? Can you think of any further embodiments that you may have missed?
• Are your embodiments clearly represented? If not, refine the sketch and text labels to clarify.

Points of interest highlighted by the examples on this page:

• The number of design concepts represented in a MC is the product of the number of embodiments for each function. (The number of concepts implied by each example MC on this page is given in the caption of each example figure.)
• You do not need to have the same number of embodiments for each function. Sometimes, it can be very difficult to ideate more than two or three embodiments. That is not necessarily a problem.