designspecified

Designspecified is a design philosophy and practice in which the development process is guided by explicit, verifiable specifications rather than by informal goals or iterative exploration alone. The term is used across disciplines, including industrial design, mechanical engineering, software engineering, and architecture, to emphasize the role of requirements, tolerances, interfaces, and performance criteria in shaping final artifacts.

Core concepts: a designspecified approach begins with comprehensive requirements gathering, followed by formal specification documents that capture functional and non-functional demands, constraints such as materials and manufacturing methods, and acceptance criteria. Throughout the lifecycle, design artifacts are traced back to these specifications, with formal verification and validation, change control, and design reviews used to ensure conformance.

Applications: In hardware, designspecified governs dimensions, tolerances, power budgets, and safety standards; in software, it manifests as API contracts, data schemas, and protocol definitions; in architecture and urban design, as structural loads, energy performance, and buildability constraints.

Benefits include improved predictability, easier compliance with standards, reproducibility, and streamlined verification. Drawbacks can include longer development cycles, reduced creative exploration, and the risk of over-constraining solutions if specifications are incomplete or biased.

Relationship to other approaches: designspecified complements iterative and user-centered methods by providing a stable reference frame; it contrasts with emergent design or exploratory prototyping, though many teams blend specification-driven and iterative methods.