NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition

NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition

2007 ASME International Design Technical Conferences (IDETC)

September 4-7, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

DESIGN FOR ‘MASS USER INVOLVEMENT’ – PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN THE YEAR 2030

AUTHOR
PhD Student Giovanna Vianello
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
Tel. +45 2667 7448
Fax. +45 45931577
/ AUTHOR
PhD student Adrian R. Tan
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
Tel. +45 2851 6052
Fax. +45 45931577
Email:
ADVISOR
Associate Professor Saeema Ahmed
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
Tel. +45 4525 5563
Fax. +45 45931577
/ ADVISOR
Associate Professor Tim C. McAloone
Technical University of Denmark
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
Tel. +45 4525 6270
Fax. +45 45931577

NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition

2007 ASME International Design Technical Conferences (IDETC)

September 4-7, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

DESIGN FOR ‘MASS USER INVOLVEMENT’ - PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN THE YEAR 2030

Abstract

"The greatest invention of the nineteenth century," said Alfred North Whitehead, "was the invention of the method of invention." If what characterized the 19th century was the invention of design and what characterized the 20th century was mass production, one can imagine that design could be broadly adopted by the masses of people in the next century. Design methods are powerful tools to create solutions that fulfill the needs of people and improve their lives. Based on emerging trends in design and development as well as projecting current trends in the world today, we propose a new design formalism for the future in 2030 that is suited for a high tech, global manufacturing company. The design formalism involves the user throughout the design process and involves the company in the entire lifecycle of its products. It is believed that this approach will give companies a competitive advantage as it creates a closer relationship to customers as well as creating the best possibilities for reducing impact of products on our natural environment. This new way of organizing the development process in collaboration with users holds many opportunities, but also challenges for companies and researchers. We point to research fields that need to be addressed to be able to implement our proposed formalism. Specifically the questions of product and service integration, learning from the product throughout its lifecycle, orchestrating development in value networks and the role of user as a designer integrated in the company’s development process.

NSF/ASME Design Essay Competition

2007 ASME International Design Technical Conferences (IDETC)

September 4-7, 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

DESIGN FOR ‘MASS useR INVOLVEMENT’ – PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT IN THE YEAR 2030

Giovanna Vianello
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Technical University of Denmark
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark
/ Adrian R. Tan
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Engineering Design & Product Development
Technical University of Denmark
Building 404, Nils Koppels Allé
DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby
Denmark

INTRODUCTION

If we were to look down the road 25 years from today what will characterize product realization for a high tech, global manufacturing enterprise such as yours? A sure bet is that we will be still striving to create “better products, cheaper and quicker than ever before” – this doctrine of ‘quality-cost-time’ has always defined design in companies and will continue to do so, but in what manner will companies attempt to create these products? This paper explores the characteristics of the design, development and final realization of products for a manufacturing enterprise in the year 2030. Based on current trends in design and development, we will extrapolate on emerging issues and explain how these will shape the process of product realization in the future. We will present a concise picture of the major opportunities and challenges that await high tech, global manufacturing enterprises in their endeavor of providing the market with competitive product offerings.

The Danish poet Piet Hein said humoristically, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” It is true that the future represents a risk in the form of unknown and uncharted territory, but at the same time if you are able to adapt and react to emerging trends the future holds great potentials. At the same time as you are a global, high tech firm, you have the ability to actually influence the future by being in the forefront of change and development. In order to do this you need to be perceptive to emerging trends and formulate a strategy to best take advantage of the new situation. We hope this paper will help you gain insights to the next 25 years and how you could react in a progressive manner.

OUR APPROACH TO DEFINING DESIGN IN 2030

We are both educated as engineers with a particular focus on engineering design and product development. At present we both work closely together with other manufacturing companies and study their design and development process in order to better understand them. Based on our research and findings we aim to direct our knowledge to companies so that they will be able to improve their design processes. We therefore feel competent to be able to assist you in understanding the conditions for the development challenges that face your enterprise in 2030. Our approach to how we shed light upon the future is first 1) describing the current situation today, 2) identifying emerging trends in design as well as the world in general, then we 3) project these trends 25 years in to the future and attempt to formulate the conditions your company will operate in. Finally 4) we will define what characterizes your company and its challenges in the year 2030 in a type of scientific formalism for design. We base our vision of the future on current literature in design and development, though interaction with companies and discussions we have had with research colleagues within the area.

WHERE IS DESIGN TODAY?

The economical and technological advances the world has experienced the past 200 years can be largely contributed to industrialization, where mass production created products at prices accessible to the majority of the population. The division of labor and machines ensured low costs through standardization and huge volumes. This method of production allowed people to fulfill their basic needs with money to spare. With the availability of a surplus of products, greater demand and consumption was encouraged and this laid the grounds for the concept of consumerism. Today this trend continues with globalization that has transformed the world into one where production and consumption no longer has geographical limitations. Global markets bring along new opportunities for manufacturing companies in the form of global supply networks, manufacturing cost efficiencies and access to new and more customers. On the other hand these opportunities also pose new challenges in the form of more competition, greater demand for coordination of activities and more diverse consumer preferences.

Companies must constantly innovate in order to survive as new global competitors enter the market. To ensure profit margins companies typically choose between two strategies: high differentiation or low costs, but with increasing global competition this has become more difficult. Faster technological advances and shorter product development cycles threaten differentiation whilst cheaper labor and more automation constantly cut manufacturing costs. The separation of production and consumption has created a traditional manufacturer-seller-consumer relationship with distinctive boundaries separating each. Mass production leads to mass consumption. All companies aim to satisfy their customers’ needs and demands, but with minimal interaction with consumers companies risk developing products that do not sell. With growing markets, customers can no longer be viewed as of one kind, but want highly customized solutions that reflect their individual needs and reinforce their identity. This has led to the current paradigm of mass customization.

EMERGING TRENDS IN DESIGN

Despite the immense progress mankind has made in the past, the compulsion to innovate has never been greater. The industrial world is constantly engaged in new, creative solutions to improve our current situation and way of life. In this section we will sum up some of the major emerging trends that we believe will guide us to new conditions for innovation .

User Driven Innovation

Innovation literature has typically described innovation as derived from either technology (push) or market (pull). Von Hippel (von Hippel 1986) was amongst the first to acknowledge a new source of innovation: ‘lead users’. Lead users experience emerging needs before others and attempt to find solutions to these needs on their own. Companies are beginning to discover how they can involve these individuals in their own design process. Even though von Hippel spotted this trend back in the 1970s, this tendency of user driven innovation is only just about to take off with the advent of online communities and the development of powerful and easy-to-use design tools.

The development of open source software, such as LINUX, has been the archetype of user driven approaches, but we see examples in many other product areas (e.g. computer games, toys, sports equipment, medical diagnostics) where the user has been an essential part of the design process.

Product/Service-Systems

A growing number of studies have focused on the potentials of business strategies based on increasing the service and knowledge elements of products. Here the focus is on providing the customer with value based on utility instead of the traditional value based on the transfer of product ownership. This provision of integrated solutions of products and services has been – dubbed ‘product/service-systems (PSS)’ (Mont, 2004).

The idea behind PSS is that they should be designed to deliver value to the customer throughout the lifecycle of the offering in an economically profitable, environmentally efficient and socially responsible manner. The general idea is that the company provides with PSS what customers actually want to pay for - the utility of products and services according to their needs without having to worry about installation, operation, maintenance and disposal of the product. This approach enables and motivates companies to reuse, rationalize and enhance their products and services more efficiently throughout their life phases. It also allows companies to enhance their competitiveness by expanding features, value and benefits not apparent with traditional product-oriented offerings.

Collaborative Design Tools

The wide spread propagation of the Internet has made the global exchange of information instantaneous, reliable and essentially free. People across the world are continuously connected in time and space. This has accelerated the potentials of collaboration across the globe, which enables the efficient utilization of global competencies and capabilities. Current new technological possibilities of web conferences and visualization of product models allow designers around the world to work together in virtually augmented environments that will facilitate the design process. Today it is usual for business-to-business enterprises to work closely with their suppliers and customers to an extent where they actively participate in the design process. Designers and developers around the globe are able to share thoughts on the latest product models and manipulate them in real time. Simulation technologies have made information easier to grasp and allow multiple solutions and scenarios to be evaluated at an early stage so informed decisions may be made.

THE WORLD NOW and IN 2030

If we look at what characterizes the world today in 2007, we can say that we are now at a point of time, where the world has never had as many people living on it; never had as much collective wealth; and never had a faster rate of adopting new technologies. Given that it is the aim of most manufacturing companies to develop and realize products and solutions that cater for the needs of the world, the current state of the world has massive implications on how we design and develop products. If we were to use Maslow’s pyramid of needs in this context, we may say that due to the wealth of people, their basic physiological and safety needs are being satisfied and they now have an opportunity to seek fulfillment of higher need levels. In relation to products this movement up the pyramid of needs will influence how people perceive the value of products. More people will seek products that will support them in their fulfillment of their social and esteem needs, as well as the need for self-actualization. We see this in our society today in the way that it is no longer relevant if we have things to eat, wear or live in, but more what we eat, wear or how we live. We are today more interested in how the food was produced, who was responsible for creating it and how it affects our health. These observations have been made by Rolf Jensen of the Copenhagen Institute of Futures Studies (CIFS) in his book “The Dream Society” (Jensen, 1999). Experience, story-telling and sense of community are all very essential in the development of products to the extent that this is more valued than the basic functionality of the product. Donald Norman makes a similar conclusion in his book “Emotional Design” (Norman 2004), where feelings and emotions influence the perceived sense of need fulfillment more than functionality.

The past years’ increasing concern with how human activities impact the natural environment of our planet may be seen as an example of how societal values are currently changing. It is no longer just about the functionality of products, we need to be ensured that the product is also as harmless to the environment as possible and manufactured in a socially responsible manner. The concept of sustainable development is already considered by most companies and is now increasingly integrated in to the design and development of products.

Another future trend that CIFS has pointed out is that an increasing amount of people no longer want to be just passive ‘users’ of products and technology, they want to be actively involved in the creation process (Mogensen, 2004). In much the same way an artist fulfills his needs of expression and self-realization, people will want to actively design the things they surround themselves with in order to express their inspiration and creativity. New widely accessible computer-aided design (CAD) tools accessible to most together with the formation of creative networks that support and share knowledge have enabled people to be more creative. Examples of this today may be seen in the web-based virtual world Second Life, where over a million users have created their own characters and virtual environment. Users proudly show their creations to each other and help each other when designing. Today’s youth are very conscious of not only who they are but also what image they and the things around them convey on to others.