<aside> 🚩 A Product Design Specification (PDS) is a document containing a description of your team's design, including previous versions of design concepts, CAD drawings, and other information pertinent to the history of your team's design.

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What is a PDS?

A PDS is a repository document for your team's current, "best" design, plus information on previous versions.

Ultimately, you want to have a document that starts with a detailed description of your final design, followed by the history of the design concepts leading up to your final design, starting from the first concepts and proceeding chronologically.

Its contents are described below.

The Final Design

The first section of the PDS will describe your final design. You will complete this section at the end of your project. It will include:

• a working set of CAD drawings of your final design; and
• a text description, up to 5 pages long, explaining the rationale for, and justifying the nature of, the Detailed Design as shown in the CAD drawings.

Design Concept History

After the final design, subsequent sections will document the design concept history.

There will be one section for each pass through the Study, Propose, Critique Loop. Each section will be named “SPC Pass 1”, “SPC Pass 2”, etc.

Each such section will include:

• the Morphological Chart as it was at the end of that pass through the loop;
• the deliverables for the Design Concept(s) developed or refined during that pass through the loop.

See Project Reporting Templates for a template for this document.

However

TBD Describe consequences and counter-indications.

Checklist

• Are the sections of the PDS properly titled?
• Are the CAD drawings in the working set complete?
• Have you removed all redundant or duplicated information from the Detailed Design description?
• Are all the concept sketches clear and legible?