What type of solutions involves altering existing designs for improved efficiency?

Prepare for the IB Design Technology Exam. Study with quizzes, flashcards, and multiple-choice questions. Each question offers hints and explanations to ensure you're ready for your test!

The correct choice identifies incremental solutions as those that involve making gradual modifications to existing designs to enhance their efficiency. Incremental solutions focus on refining and optimizing current systems or products by introducing small, manageable changes rather than overhauling an entire design. This approach allows for testing and verification of the improvements in a controlled manner, minimizing risk while often leading to significant cumulative benefits over time.

For instance, if a company has a manufacturing process that consumes a lot of energy, an incremental solution could involve upgrading certain components to more energy-efficient models instead of completely redesigning the entire system. This not only saves resources but also capitalizes on the existing framework while still enhancing its performance.

In contrast, other types of solutions differ in their approach and scope. System level solutions encompass redesigns at a broader scale, examining entire systems rather than focusing on gradual adjustments. Radical solutions aim for groundbreaking changes and innovation, often discarding existing designs altogether in favor of completely new concepts. End-of-pipe solutions are fixes that treat the symptoms of a problem rather than addressing its root cause, making them less about efficiency improvement of existing designs and more about mitigating negative impacts of processes that are already in place.

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