Design Innovation With Additive Manufacturing: A Methodology

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) has matured rapidly in the past decade and has made significant progress towards a reliable and repeatable manufacturing process. The technology opens the doors for new types of innovation in engineering product development. However, there exists a need for a design process framework to efficiently and effectively explore these newly enabled design spaces. Significant work has been done to understand how to make existing products and components additively manufacturable, yet there still exists an opportunity to understand how AM can be leveraged from the very outset of the design process. Beyond end use products, AM-enabled opportunities include an enhanced design process using AM, new business models enabled by AM, and the production of new AM technologies. In this work, we propose the use, adaptation and evolution of the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre’s Design Innovation (DI) framework to assist organizations effectively explore all of these AM opportunities in an efficient and guided manner. We build on prior work that extracted and formalized design principles for AM. This paper discusses the creation and adaptation of the Design Innovation with Additive Manufacturing (DIwAM) methodology, through the combination of these principles and methods under the DI framework to better identify and realize new innovations enabled by AM. The paper concludes with a representative case study with industry that employs the DIwAM framework and the outcomes of that project. Future studies will analyze the effects that DIwAM has on designers, projects, and solutions.

Industrial evaluation of design heuristics for additive manufacturing

“…Table 1 lists these 18 characteristics and provides references to the supporting literature. Although much additional research in this area has been published since the survey was conducted in 2019 (e.g., Perez et al 2019;Prabhu et al 2019;Schumacher et al 2019;Valjak & Bojčetić 2019;Watschke et al 2019;Wiberg, Persson, & Ölvander 2019;Dordlofva & Törlind 2020;Prabhu et al 2020b;Valjak et al 2020), it was conciously decided not to update Table 1, because of the results' direct connection to the development of the questionnaire used to evaluate the method (see Sections 3-3.3).…”

Review of Design Heuristics and Design Principles in Design for Additive Manufacturing

“…Here the AM design knowledge is written with formal syntax and further described with schematics and examples. The DP are organised in four categories (product, business process, design process, printing) and are to be used in Design Innovation with AM Methodology (Perez, Lauff, et al, 2019). With this transformation, their applicability is expended to be used throughout the design process, but also can be used in the business assessment of AM product development.…”

Additive manufacturing technologies and business models – a systematic literature review

“…Blake Perez et al (2019), who investigated how AMT can be used from the outset of the design process, found that AMTs are not simply tools for product and parts production. AMTs are powerful tools that are useful at all levels of abstraction and in phases of the design process.…”