Identifying the Effects of Immersion on Design for Additive Manufacturing Evaluation of Designs of Varying Manufacturability

Abstract

The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.

Exploring the impact of design tool usage on design for additive manufacturing processes and outcomes

“…DfAM training in academic contexts is often limited to lecture-based modalities given the time and cost constraints associated with manufacturing, but interactive DfAM training has been found to be related to larger increases in DfAM self-efficacy when compared with lecture (Prabhu et al 2021), so interactive training is desirable. Emerging research suggests that virtual training for AM technologies is as effective as in-person training (Mathur et al 2021). We hypothesize that virtual prototyping activities, like the design task described here, could help promote self-efficacy and involvement in prototyping activities by providing students with low-stakes opportunities to gain competence and confidence in DfAM.…”