Design Methods Used During Early Stages of Product Development: Three Company Cases

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlye A. Lauff ◽  
Daria Kotys-Schwartz ◽  
Mark E. Rentschler
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Consumer Electronics ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Early Stages

Companies need to employ new design methods and tools to remain competitive in today’s global economy. Design methods are used to help teams move through the different stages of the design process, such as during project scoping, concept generation, and concept selection. Concept generation design methods are meant to help teams generate diverse, novel, and creative potential solutions. However, most design methods are developed and refined based on studies with student teams. This limits our understanding of how professionals engage with design methods in practice. This is a case study exploring the design methods used by three companies during the early stages of new product development. These companies are from the consumer electronics, footwear, and medical devices industries, and each design team within the companies was tasked with developing a new physical end product. We identified that all three teams heavily relied on internal and external benchmarking and reverse engineering design methods as part of concept generation. Ultimately, the products they developed were all considered evolutionary, meaning that the final product was a slightly improved version of similar products already on the market. This contrasts revolutionary products, which can change or disrupt the current field in one or more ways. This research contributes to design theory and methodology through empirically studying how companies engage in the design process, identifying the methods employed by professionals, and raising new questions about design methods, especially translation to industry. This research also contributes to design education by identifying methods that professionals use in practice, which can translate to direct recommendations for improving project-based engineering design courses.

Introducing the Industrial Product Realization Process Into Mechanical Engineering Design Education

1995 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vance D. Browne
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Process Development ◽  
Project Planning ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Engineering Project ◽  
Engineering Design Education ◽  
Realization Process ◽  
Product Realization

Abstract The process by which new products are brought to market — the product realization process, or PRP — can be introduced in engineering design education. In industry, the PRP has been evolving to concurrent engineering and product teams. The PRP includes components such as concept generation, analysis, manufacturing process development and customer interaction. Also, it involves the sequencing of the components and their connections which includes teamwork, project planning, meetings, reports and presentations. A capstone senior engineering project, along with classroom lectures and presentations can be structured to provide knowledge and experience to the students in many of the PRP components and the connections. This paper will give an overview of the PRP and a project/lecture structure at the author’s university. The instructor recently joined the academic ranks after years in industry with responsibility for directing product development and R&D and for leading product development teams.

Tangible interactions in a digital age: Medium and graphic visualization in design journals

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lora Oehlberg ◽  
Kimberly Lau ◽  
Alice Agogino
Keyword(s):  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Preliminary Investigation ◽  
Digital Design ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Test Bed ◽  
Media Type

AbstractDesigners are interacting with an increasing number of digital tools in their design process; however, these are usually in addition to the traditional and ubiquitous paper-based design journals. This paper explores the medium of informal design information and its relationships with sketching behavior over three stages of the design process: preliminary investigation and user needs analyses, concept generation and development, and prototyping and testing. Our test bed consists of tangible, digital, and hybrid design journals collected from four semesters of UC Berkeley's graduate level, multidisciplinary course titled “Managing the New Product Development Process: Design Theory and Methods.” We developed protocols for two categories of analysis: one that codes for the media type of each journal and its content, and another one that characterizes the content within the journal. We found a trend toward hybrid digital–tangible journals for the engineering students over the 4-year period. These hybrid journals exhibited a higher degree of detail over advancing design stages, which has been shown to correlate with improved project performance. We also present several case studies of unusual design journals that illustrate the range of designers' interpretations of design journals as a medium. Based on this descriptive research, features for interactive hybrid tangible–digital design journals are recommended.

Rethinking Design: The Formal Integration of Engineering Innovation Into a Design Process

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aziz M. Naim ◽  
Kemper E. Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Design Methods ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Innovative Products ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
Formal Integration ◽  
Tremendous Impact

Innovation has been a hallmark of progress throughout human history. There are many innovative products that have had a tremendous impact on mankind’s quality of life. As engineering design matures into a field defined by scientific principles, there is a need for guidelines to help the designer select and apply appropriate tools and methods to support the development of innovative products. There has been significant work developing design methods to support the development of innovative products. There has been significant work developing design methods to support the development of innovative products as well as to understand the characteristics of the innovative products. Many of these methods however present themselves as a unique solution to develop innovative products but fail to fully define innovation. Furthermore, few guidelines are provided to the designer as to when to use the available tools with respect to the market dynamics, making the use of these methods sometimes ineffective. With a general push for US companies to become increasingly more innovative, it is important more than ever to understand and situate innovation in design practices in order to promote successful and consistent development of innovative products. This paper proposes a set of new “innovation for engineers” guidelines that are defined and used along existing engineering design theory and cyberinfrastructure design tools in a design process.

scholarly journals TOOLS FOR RECORDING PROTOTYPING ACTIVITIES AND QUANTIFYING CORRESPONDING DOCUMENTATION IN THE EARLY STAGES OF PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 3159-3168
Author(s):  
Sohail Ahmed Soomro ◽  
Yazan A M Barhoush ◽  
Zhengya Gong ◽  
Panos Kostakos ◽  
Georgi V. Georgiev
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Design Education ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Digital Fabrication ◽  
Prototype Development ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Creative Solutions ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractPrototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

Proposing a Practical Method for Conceptual Design Process in New Product Development: Medical Glasses as a Case Study

2014 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 80
Author(s):  
Amir Mirzadeh Phirouzabadi
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
Conceptual Design ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Quality Function Deployment ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
New Product ◽  
Practical Method ◽  
Effect Analysis ◽  
Quality Of Products

Nowadays,improving the quality of products, reducing cost and meeting customer’srequirements are necessary to shorten the time of new product development(NPD). NPD is used to describe the complete process of bringing a new product to market and conceptual design process(CDP) is at its early stage and has mostly changed from passive respond toaggressive one. Thus, this study proposed a practical method for CDP in NPDthrough three phases as Converting customers’ requirements to product specifications,Generating and selecting of concepts and Testing and finalizing the concepts byusing some different management-engineering techniques. Firstly, this papertried to prioritize customer’s requirements related to product by AHP (AnalyticHierarchy Process) and convert them to engineering parameters of TRIZ (Theoryof Inventive Problem Solving) in order to define the inventive principals.Next, based on QFD (Quality Function Deployment), we measured the weight valuesof inventive principals. Finally, as FMEA (Failure Mode and Effect Analysis)can analyze the weight values and reduce the sequential risk, then finalconceptual design was generated. At the end, a medical glasses was used as acase study of innovative design to validate the method and explain how thestrategies of this research for CDP.

scholarly journals Incorporating Patent Analysis in Axiomatic Design for New Product Development

2019 ◽  
Vol 301 ◽  
pp. 00015
Author(s):  
Wenguang Lin ◽  
Renbin Xiao ◽  
Rongshen Lai ◽  
Xiaozhen Guo
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
Design Theory ◽  
Target Function ◽  
Axiomatic Design ◽  
New Product ◽  
Patent Analysis ◽  
Design Parameters ◽  
Functional Requirements ◽  
Axiomatic Design Theory

Axiomatic design theory is widely used in new product development by providing design solutions through mapping between functional requirements and design parameters. However, the theory does not provide a method to help designer obtain and select design parameters. To this end, this paper introduces patent analysis to overcome the deficiency. Firstly, functional requirements are transformed into patent search terms, and design parameters are obtained from patents. Secondly, morphological matrix is used to represent the relationships between target function and multiple design parameters. Thirdly, design parameters with higher patent frequency are chose and combined into a new scheme. Finally, the scheme is evaluated by the independent axiom of Axiomatic Design theory. The methodology is demonstrated and validated with a case study of spa shower.

Evaluating the Discriminatory Value and Reliability of Ideation Metrics for Their Application to Concept Development and Prototyping

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Menold ◽  
Kathryn Jablokow ◽  
Timothy Simpson ◽  
Rafael Seuro
Keyword(s):  
Product Development ◽  
New Product Development ◽  
New Product ◽  
Concept Development ◽  
Product Development Process ◽  
Concept Generation ◽  
Market Place ◽  
Design Changes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Original Concept

Approximately half of new product development projects fail in the market place. Within the product development process, prototyping represents the largest sunk cost; it also remains the least researched and understood. While researchers have recently started to evaluate the impact of formalized prototyping methods and frameworks on end designs, these studies have typically evaluated the success or failure of these methods using binary metrics, and they often evaluate only the design’s technical feasibility. Intuitively, we know that a product’s success or failure in the marketplace is determined by far more than just the product’s technical quality; and yet, we have no clear way of evaluating the design changes and pivots that occur during concept development and prototyping activities, as an explicit set of rigorous and informative metrics to evaluate ideas after concept selection does not exist. The purpose of the current study was to investigate the discriminatory value and reliability of ideation metrics originally developed for concept generation as metrics to evaluate functional prototypes and related concepts developed throughout prototyping activities. Our investigation revealed that new metrics are needed in order to understand the translation of product characteristics, such as originality, novelty, and quality, from original concept through concept development and prototyping to finalized product.

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