During product development, the design evolves as decisions are made. At the beginning, there is often only a general idea about what the product might be. Moving through the stages of development, decisions are made about what requirements the product must meet, what the overall product concept will be, what components will be included, how the components will interact with one another, what the detailed geometry, materials, and manufacturing processes for physical parts will be, and many more design issues. At the time the product is produced, all of these decisions will have been made.

If only one person is entirely responsible for the design and production, it is possible (though unlikely), that all of these decisions can be captured entirely in the person's head. However, if more than one person is involved in the process, the decisions must be captured in a transferable way. We call the means used to make design decisions transferable product development artifacts, or artifacts for short.

Many artifacts, such as drawings, bills of materials, and test reports, are captured in written or printed form. However, there are artifacts like prototypes, solid CAD models, and software, that exist in other forms. Regardless of the form, artifacts must be transferable and should be revision-controlled, so that if changes are made, all involved are aware that the artifact has been changed.

Artifacts include whatever is necessary to capture the decision that is made, justify the decision that is made, describe the critical operation of the product, demonstrate that the design works correctly, or help to transfer the idea of the product. The development team will need to decide what artifacts are needed for a particular product. To help you in your consideration, Table of Common Artifacts lists some artifacts that are commonly used.

Artifacts document design decisions. If all possible information about every design decision made were recorded in an artifact, the development team would quickly drown in paperwork. However, different levels of design decisions can employ different amounts of and detail in artifacts. Critical decisions must be well documented, but other decision levels also require artifacts. To guide you in your Capstone design, design decision levels and their required artifacts are discussed in the Decision Levels page.

The creation of artifacts can feel like “paperwork”, rather than actual design work. However, this is not true – they are a fundamental part of the design process! Poor artifacts result in poor design transferability, which invariably reduces the desirability of the product. Thus, when artifacts are necessary to advance the design, we should always strive to make them excellent. To help in the creation of excellent artifacts, consider three times for When to Create Artifacts. Capstone recommends that your create appropriate artifacts when decisions that require artifacts are made.

Each written artifact is contained in its own document and/or computer file. This allows easy changes to individual artifacts, without having to change the entire artifact package. Artifacts need to be readily identified, including their revision. In Capstone, we accomplish this by having an artifact title block, described here: Artifact Title Block.

There are different levels of formality in artifacts, from rough sketches to final documents and drawings. As you prepare for documentation reviews the content of an artifact is obviously critical, but a well-formatted, clear artifact reflects your level of professionalism and care for your work. Capstone has provided some Artifact Formatting guidelines to help you.