While fundamentals of DFMA are widely accepted and used in the engineering design community, many CAD environments lack tools that address manufacturing concerns and provide rapid feedback to designers about manufacturing impacts of their design choices. This paper presents an experiment-based testing and validation of a rapid feedback tool that provides users a history-based prediction of manufacturing time based on the current state of the design. A between-subjects experiment is designed to evaluate the impact of the tool on design outcomes based on modeling time, part mass, and manufacturing time. Participants in the study included mechanical engineering graduate and undergraduate students with at least one semester of experience using SolidWorks. The experiment included three different design activities and three different conditions of the design tool. Participants completed up to three sessions with different experimental conditions. Analysis of the data collected shows that use of the design tool results in a small but nonsignificant increase in modeling time. Moreover, use of the tool results in reduced part mass on average, as well as in a within-subject comparison. Tool use reduced manufacturing time in open ended activities, but increased manufacturing time when activities focus more on mass-reduction. Participant feedback suggests that the tool helped guide their material removal actions by showing the impact on manufacturing time. Finally, potential improvements and future expansions of the tool are discussed.
Generally, engineering design progresses from generating requirements to developing concepts. Despite this, educators observe that students have ideas for the eventual solution before fully defining the problem. Thus, a method of exploiting this natural proclivity may result in a better overall product or process. Coevolutionary design may provide a theoretical construct for such a method. It may be that sketching as a first step may improve the resulting requirements, which in turn would result in higher quality solutions. To test this, an experiment is used to study the effects of rearranging the design sequence to use an early conceptual sketch in the elicitation of constraints and criteria. Requirements generated by students were analyzed based on their quantity, completeness, variety, typology, and novelty. It was found that the use of a preliminary conceptual sketch had a significant (positive) effect on the quantity, typology, and novelty of the resulting requirements, though no change in their variety was observed. Also, an additional intermediate step of identifying key features in the sketch further influenced requirement characteristics. The findings of this study support the coevolutionary model of design and suggest that the sketching of ideas and the identification of features in advance of listing requirements may be a valid design practice in the future. Using sketches and feature identification helps in clarifying requirements for the participants. Finally, this method can align more naturally with the approach that many students employ in design. Rather than modifying behaviors, this method can exploit student behaviors to positive effect.
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