A Law of Functional Expansion - Eliciting the Dynamics of Consumer Goods Innovation with Design Theory

Abstract

For more than two decades, mobile phone industry has shown that innovation is not only functional optimization and combination but can also be a "functional expansion”. Sometimes called radical or disruptive innovation, this phenomenon leads to the development of new method for engineers and designers. However, the intensity remains undemonstrated: is functional expansion a rare phenomenon (few products during very short periods of time) – or is it an intense phenomenon, that even might have accelerated in the last decades? To answer these questions, the paper overcomes two main obstacles: how to measure functional expansion? And what would be a law of functional expansion, that would enable to test the importance and newness of the phenomena? Building on recent advances on the measurement of innovation and on new computational models of design derived from most advanced design theories, this paper presents unique data on functional expansion of 8 consumer products and tests that functional expansion significantly accelerated in the mid 1990s. The paper confirms quantitatively that our societies are now in a new design regime, a regime of innovative design.

The Hidden Feat Behind Development Cost Escalation - How Engineering Design Enables Functional Expansion in the Aerospace Industry

“…market-pull or techno-push dynamics, regulatory requirements…) but from a dynamic of design that is internal to the product. Empirical tests reveal that most of the studied consumption goods (apart from the refrigerator) follow this regime of endogenous expansion (El Qaoumi, 2016) which accelerates from the 1990s (Le Masson et al, 2018). These findings contrast with Lancaster's (1966) theory according to which the evolution of goods results from the combinations and re-combinations of a given fixed set of characteristics.…”

“…These works identify a pattern of growth in the number of new functionalities that corresponds to a permanent transformation, involving not rare nor random, but frequent functional disruptions: such patterns of growth are characterized as regimes of functional expansion (El Qaoumi, 2016). If one considers each function as one edge of a graphic matroid, different possible evolution scenarii of the matroid rank can be associated with different regimes of functional expansion (El Qaoumi, 2016 ; Le Masson et al, 2018). One of these regimes is called 'endogenous expansion' where endogenous means that the functional change does not result from exogenous / external events (e.g.…”

Sheafification as a Design Technique for Creative Preservation – Principles, Illustrations, and First Applications

“…Hence, our method is to apply design theory to a particular knowledge structure in the hope that we can account for both its transformation and its preservation through the design process. We follow a method previously used to study specific design regimes (Hatchuel et al 2013;Le Masson et al 2016;Le Masson et al 2019). We rely on C-K design theory because this theory is largely independent of knowledge structures, and thus is compatible with many models of K. The critical issue is the knowledge structure: what is a relevant 'knowledge model' that enables us to answer our research questions?…”