Product Design

DE ZG541
BITS Pilani Lecture - 7 Dr. Glynn John
Mechanical Engineering
Pilani Campus
 BITS Pilani
Pilani Campus

DE ZG541, Product Design

Lecture No. 7
Contents
 Concept generation methods (Cont.)
 Product Life Cycle
 Kano Diagram for Customer Satisfaction
 Concept selection methods

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 BASIC METHODS OF GENERATING
CONCEPTS
 Brainstorming as a Source of Ideas
 Using the 6-3-5 Method as a Source of Ideas
 The Use of Analogies in Design
 Finding Ideas in Reference Books and Trade Journals and
on the Web
 Using Experts to Help Generate Concepts
 PATENTS AS A SOURCE OF IDEAS
 Using contradictions to generate ideas

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 Using Contradictions
This means that the ability to fulfill the target for one requirement
adversely affects the ability to fulfill another.

Some examples are

■ The product gets stronger (good) but the weight increases (bad).
■ More functions (good) make products larger and heavier (bad).
■ An automobile airbag should deploy very fast, to protect the occupant
(good), but the faster it deploys, the more likely it is to injure somebody
(bad).

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 THE THEORY OF INVENTIVE
MACHINES, TRIZ
 TRIZ (pronounced “trees”) is the acronym for the Russian
phrase “The Theory of Inventive Machines.” TRIZ is based
on two ideas:
 Many of the problems that engineers face contain
elements that have already been solved, often in a
completely different industry, for a totally unrelated
situation, that uses an entirely different technology to solve
the problem.
 There are predictable patterns of technological change that
can be applied to any situation to determine the most
probably successful next steps.

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 Building a Morphology
 The technique presented here uses the functions identified
to foster ideas.
 It is a very powerful method that can be used formally, as
presented here, or informally as part of everyday thinking.

There are three steps to this technique.

 The first step is to list the decomposed functions that must
be accomplished.
 The second step is to find as many concepts as possible that
can provide each function identified in the decomposition.
 The third is to combine these individual concepts into overall
concepts that meet all the functional requirements.

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Morphology / Morphological Matrix

Follow the KISS rule:

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

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 Hannover Principles
 Additionally, conceptual design is a good time to review the
Hannover Principles
 Questions derived from the Principles that should be asked
at this time are
 Do your concepts enable humanity and nature to coexist in
a healthy, supportive, diverse, and sustainable condition?
 Do you understand the effects of your concepts on other
systems, even the distant effects?
 Are concepts safe and of long-term value?.
 Do your concepts help eliminate the concept of waste
throughout their life cycle?
 Where possible, do they rely on natural energy flows?
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Product Life Cycle

Life cycle of a product

BITS Pilani, Pilani Campus

 Exercises
Use brainstorming to develop at least 25 ideas for

 A way to fasten together loose sheets of paper.

 A device to keep water off a mountain-bike rider.
 A way to convert human energy to power a boat.

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 Exercises
Use brain-writing to develop at least 25 ideas for
 A device to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
 A way to fasten a gear to a shaft and transmit 500 watts.

 Finish reverse engineering the one-handed bar clamp

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The Kano diagram for customer
satisfaction.

The Kano model was developed by

Dr. Noriaki Kano in the early 1980s
to describe customer satisfaction.

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Concept Selection

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 Methods for Choosing a Concept
 External decision: Concepts are turned over to the customer, client, or some
other external entity for selection.
 Product champion: An influential member of the product development team
chooses a concept based on personal preference.
 Intuition: The concept is chosen by its feel. Explicit criteria or trade-offs are
not used. The concept just seems better.
 Multi-voting: Each member of the team votes for several concepts. The
concept with the most votes is selected.
 Web-based survey: Using an online survey tool, each concept is rated by
many people to find the best ones.
 Pros and cons: The team lists the strengths and weaknesses of each concept
and makes a choice based upon group opinion.
 Prototype and test: The organization builds and tests prototypes of each
concept, making a selection based upon test data.
 Decision matrices: The team rates each concept against pre-specified
selection criteria, which may be weighted.

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 A Structured Method Offers Several Benefits
• A customer-focused product: Because concepts are explicitly evaluated
against customer-oriented criteria, the selected concept is likely to be focused on
the customer.
• A competitive design: By benchmarking concepts with respect to existing
designs, designers push the design to match or exceed their competitors’
performance along key dimensions.
• Concept selection is an iterative process closely related to concept generation
and testing. The concept screening and scoring methods help the team refine
and improve the concepts, leading to one or more promising concepts upon
which further testing and development activities will be focused.
– concept generation
– concept screening
– concept scoring
– concept testing
• Better product-process coordination: Explicit evaluation of the product with
respect to manufacturing criteria improves the product’s manufacturability and
helps to match the product with the process capabilities of the firm.
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 A Structured Method Offers Several Benefits
• Reduced time to product introduction: A structured method becomes a
common language among design engineers, manufacturing engineers,
industrial designers, marketers, and project managers, resulting in decreased
ambiguity, faster communication, and fewer false starts.
• Effective group decision making: Within the development team,
organizational philosophy and guidelines, willingness of members to
participate, and team member experience may constrain the concept selection
process. A structured method encourages decision making based on objective
criteria and minimizes the likelihood that arbitrary or personal factors influence
the product concept.
• Documentation of the decision process: A structured method results in a
readily understood archive of the rationale behind concept decisions. This
record is useful for assimilating new team members and for quickly assessing
the impact of changes in the customer needs or in the available alternatives.

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 Overview of Methodology
 The first stage is called concept screening
 The second stage is called concept scoring.
 Each is supported by a decision matrix that is used by the
team to rate, rank, and select the best concept(s).
• Screening is a quick, approximate evaluation aimed at
producing a few viable alternatives.
• Scoring is a more careful analysis of these relatively few
concepts in order to choose the single concept most likely
to lead to product success.

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Case Study - Outpatient syringe

Courtesy of Novo Nordisk Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

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 Case Study - Outpatient syringe
A medical supply company retained a product design firm to develop a reusable
syringe with precise dosage control for outpatient use.
One of the products sold by a competitor is shown.
To focus the development effort, the medical supply company identified two major
problems with its current product: cost (the existing model was made of stainless
steel) and accuracy of dose metering.
The company also requested that the product be tailored to the physical
capabilities of the elderly, an important segment of the target market.
To summarize the needs of its client and of the intended end users, the team
established seven criteria on which the choice of a product concept would be
based:

 Ease of handling.
 Ease of use.
 Readability of dose settings.
 Dose metering accuracy.
 Durability.
 Ease of manufacture.
 Portability.

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Concept A: Master Cylinder

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Concept B: Rubber Brake

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Concept C: Ratchet

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Concept D: Plunge Stop

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Concept E: Swash Ring

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Concept F: Lever Set

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Concept G: Dial Screw

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Concept Selection

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Concept Screening
 Step 1: Prepare the Selection Matrix
 Step 2: Rate the Concepts
 Step 3: Rank the Concepts
 Step 4: Combine and Improve the Concepts
 Step 5: Select One or More Concepts
 Step 6: Reflect on the Results and the Process

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Concept Screening

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Concept G+: Dial Screw

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The Concept-scoring matrix
(Pugh’s Decision Matrix)

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 Product Safety, the Goal of Product
Risk Understanding
 One area of product understanding that is often overlooked until late in the
project is product safety.
 It is valuable to consider both safety and the engineer’s responsibility for it,
as safety is an integral part of human-product interaction and greatly affects
the perceived quality of the product.
 Safety is best thought of early in the design process
 A safe product will not cause injury or loss. Two issues must be considered
in designing a safe product.
 First, who or what is to be protected from injury or loss during the operation
of the product? Second, how is the protection actually implemented in the
product?
 The main consideration in design for safety is the protection of people from
injury by the product.
 Beyond concerns for humans, safety includes concern for the loss of other
property affected by the product and the product’s impact on the
environment in case of failure.
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 Safety
 There are three ways to establish product safety. The first way is to
design safety directly into the product.
 This means that the device poses no inherent danger during normal
operation or in case of failure.
 If inherent safety is impossible, as it is with most rotating machinery,
some electronics, and all vehicles,
 second way to design in safety is to add protective devices to the
product.
 Examples
 of added safety devices are shields around rotating parts, crash-
protective structures (as in automobile body design), and automatic cut-
off switches, which automatically turn a device off (or on) if there is no
human contact.
 The third, and weakest, form of design for safety is a warning of the
dangers inherent in the use of a product
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 Thank you

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