An Engineering Design Approach for Accelerating Innovative Design Solutions in a Rapid Prototyping Environment

Abstract

With time as a major competitive factor in today's marketplace, it is crucial to bring products to the market and solve problems in existing products in a swift manner. Rapid prototyping methods are very effective ways of streamlining this effort. However, current rapid prototyping methods generally apply after a solution concept has been selected. Many current conceptual design methods were reviewed and it was shown that a need exists for similar acceleration of the problem identification, idea generation, and concept selection portions of the design process. This would bring the conceptual front end of the design process under the umbrella of what is considered 'rapid prototyping'. The Ideal Final Result (IFR) of each of the three major conceptual steps was developed to be able to formulate a series of steps to accelerate the process by performing only what is necessary to accomplish the IFR's. The existing methods and custom-designed methods provided for filling in what was needed for each step. An 'Ideality-based' concept selection method was developed to make the idea selection process more complete. The entire methodology is explained in detail, and a case study to use the new methodology was performed on an existing, real problem situation to show the useful and accelerated nature of the method.