Understanding the Role of Additive Manufacturing Knowledge in Stimulating Design Innovation for Novice Designers

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) is recognized as a disruptive technology that offers significant potentials for innovative design. Prior experimental studies have revealed that novice designers provided with AM knowledge (AMK) resources can generate a higher quantity and quality of solutions in contrast with control groups. However, these studies have adopted coarse-grain evaluation metrics that fall short in correlating AMK with radical or architectural innovation. This deficiency directly affects the capturing, modeling, and delivering AMK so that novel opportunities may be more efficiently utilized in ideation stage. To refine the understanding of AMK's role in stimulating design innovation, an experimental study is conducted with two design projects: (a) a mixer design project, and (b) a hairdryer redesign project. The former of which aims to discover whether AMK inspiration increases the quantity and novelty of working principles (WP) (i.e., radical innovation), while the latter examines the influence of AMK on layout and feature novelty (i.e., architectural innovation). The experimental study indicates that AMK does have a positive influence on architectural innovation while the effects on radical innovation are very limited if the example illustrating the AMK is functionally irrelevant to the design problem. Two strategies are proposed to aid the ideation process in maximizing the possibility of identifying AM potentials to facilitate radical innovation. The limitations of this study and future research plans are discussed.

Laying the Groundwork for STEAM: Scaling and Supporting 3D Design and Printing in Higher Education

“…In undergraduate education, there is currently a gap in the widespread adoption of computer-aided design (CAD) and additive manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printing (3DP), that is limiting the interdisciplinary integration of these innovations into science, technology, arts, engineering, and mathematics (STEAM) education. The teaching of CAD and 3DP conventionally occurs in select university courses that focus on computer graphics (Payne, 2015), general engineering (Chong et al, 2018;Taheri, 2018), product development (Yang et al, 2019;Savolainen and Collan, 2020), and industrial design (Junk and Matt, 2015;Ford and Minshall, 2019). Recently, however, the availability of affordable, reliable, and highly maintainable consumer-grade 3D printers has created an opportunity to infuse CAD and 3DP as shared literacies that can cross disciplinary boundaries in a meaningful way.…”

Evaluating the Potential of Design for Additive Manufacturing Heuristic Cards to Stimulate Novel Product Redesigns

“…Prior to the past few years, the development of DfAM methods has been dominated by restrictive and opportunistic topology optimization methods [8][9][10]. However, recently there has been a lot of interest in developing opportunistic DfAM methods that help people during the Conceptual Design phase [11][12][13][14][15][16], including previous work by the authors in developing design heuristics for additive manufacturing derived from a synthesis of the key AM features of 275 AM artifacts sourced from academia, industry, the media, and hobbyists [15]. These heuristics have already been validated, but they lack a fixed delivery format and their ability to stimulate the inclusion of the four unique capabilities of AM and increase the AM novelty and AM flexibility of the designs has not been evaluated.…”

“…With this in mind, several research groups have been working on tackling the transfer of opportunistic AMK to designers in the early phases of the design process. For example, [14] looked at using a small AMK booklet presenting ten AM potentials with the goal of stimulating radical and architectural innovation, and [11] investigated combining existing, established design methods with AMK to assist designers with DfAM in the early phases of the design process. [12] provided information sheets about various AM concepts to designers during the Conceptual Design phase, and [16] explored the use of Mood Boards for visual inspiration, a checklist of the most important AM design rules, an interactive system for AM design potentials, and 3D models for AM design potentials.…”

“…All of the previously mentioned studies used some form of verification or validation of their methods. This ranged from comparison with literature [13] to user surveys [7,11,16] to third-party evaluation of the designs generated in controlled user studies [12,14,15]. Those that used user surveys mainly focused on the opinions of the users as to whether or not they thought the method was useful or easy to use.…”

“…Additionally, almost all of these studies mentioned the importance of the innovative effect that incorporating AM into the early phases of the design process can have. However, only one of these studies objectively assessed this effect [14], and none of the studies looked at the effect of the method on the prevalence of the four unique capabilities of AM in the results, namely shape, material, hierarchical, and functional complexity [1].…”