How Axiomatic Design can promote creativity in the design of new products

Abstract

Abstract. In product development, creativity is the driving force for doing something that leads to innovation. A typical ideation background has three subsystems: inspiration, dematerialization and recombination. The most basic concepts of Axiomatic Design, i.e. domains, hierarchies and zigzagging, as well as the two design axioms, provide a powerful framework to implement ideation, as to make creativity easier when developing a new product. The result of dematerialization is in the functional domain, which is the place where the customer needs are presented by functional requirements and purged of any kind of physical bias. The recombination creates the design parameters, at the physical domain, which are the set of elements of the design object that have been chosen to satisfy the functional requirements, into a new materialization profile of a new product. In this paper, a concrete case illustrating the above-mentioned concepts is presented.