Product Design & Development:

  • New designs.

  • Repairing, adjusting, or upgrading designs. 

  • Unusual or difficult designs. 

  • Productive designer-supplier relationship. 

  • Design for Manufacture.  Integrated Product Design.

  • Design Assistance:  Process or manufacturing;
     Process and Design FMEA's; tolerance analysis; project planning;
     ideation and design concept evaluation. 

Design for Manufacture, Integrated Product Design

Hello, 

My name is Rick Stockton; I am a Product Designer. I use SolidWorks to create solid models, drawings, and design solutions. 

But I did not start my career designing. After earning my engineering degree from Texas A&M University, I started my career in Product Design — but with a detour. 

I spent almost 15 years NOT designing products. 
Instead, I practiced manufacturing and process development, tool design, and quality. I had intended to get into product design, but fell into manufacturing and process development instead.

Manufacturing engineering did not seem to be a good route to being a product designer. But that evaluation would have been a little short-sighted.

As it turned out, manufacturing and process development were exactly the perfect preparation for designing products so that they would be:

a.  manufacturable
b.  measurable, and 
c.  assembleable 

...while maintaining:

1.  performance specs 
2.  production rate, and 
3.  reasonable costs. 

Every day on the job, I got a manufacturing-eye view of why some designs worked on the factory floor and, conversely, why some just didn't.

Sometimes, my process work helped me to drive design changes back up the heirarchy to the designers. It was clear, though, that I could do this much more quickly as the Designer.

I realized that it really was time I made a transition. And I did.

Now, I have been Product Designer for a decade and a half plus.
And it really does work. If you know what's ahead, you can design for it. It makes design way more interesting, and much more productive.

I can make the designs more flexible by working around process constraints, and building-in process capability. It's also cheaper to design quality control into the geometry than to force it into place afterward. 

The results include:

 • Design flexibility, 

 • Superior quality control, and

 • A more seamless manufacturing deployment.

This approach is so useful that universities have created Masters of Science degrees to try to reproduce what I received on my manufacturing and product design journey. It is often called Integrated Product Design. 

But, it's what I practice every day. And it's a good reason to contact me about your current product.  

All the best,

Rick Stockton
Mechanical Designer (and "President" of my little one-man LLC)
J. R. Stockton Consulting, LLC 

linkedin.com/in/rickstockton