Design Principle Cards: Toolset to Support Innovations With Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to play an important role in product development, and many companies are searching for how to best integrate AM into their products, business models, and design processes. Often, AM is integrated into later stages of the design process for products during manufacturing and production. However, there is an opportunity to introduce AM in early-stage design, which could spark new business models and services in addition to re-thinking manufacturing for products. The central research question for this paper is what is an appropriate and useful tool to support innovations with AM early in the design process? Prior work has extracted and validated AM design principles. This paper describes the strategic development of AM Principle Cards from these design principles. The cards are a vehicle for codified AM design principles to be shared and understood in a way that inspires learning, creativity, and AM considerations during the early stages of the design process. They implement a number of best-known practices from an inductive principle-extraction study and literature related to the use of design stimuli, learning theory, design by analogy, and creativity. The AM cards were awarded a Singapore Good Design Award (SG Mark) for 2019. The AM Principle Cards were validated in two studies. In this paper, an ideation study is conducted with 85 designers to elicit feedback about the cards’ effectiveness to explain concepts related to AM and their ability to inspire creativity and new innovations. An additional ideation study was conducted with 61 participants that showed significant improvement in quality and novelty of ideas. The full deck of the final 27 AM Principle Cards is shared for design educators and practitioners to use.

Exploring creativity management of design for additive manufacturing

“…Blösch-Paidosh & Shea, 2019;Lindwall & Törlind, 2018, and design principles, e.g. ;Perez et al, 2019;Lauff et al, 2019), but more research is needed on how to fully include these in industrial design practices.…”

Additive Manufacturing Research Landscape: A Literature Review

“…They are derived from a large pool of experience or empirically, e.g. (Lauff et al, 2019;Valjak and Bojčetić, 2019).  AM guidelines provide context-dependent statements that are empirically tested or based on extensive experience and are more restrictive and less general than principles, e.g.…”

“… AM guidelines provide context-dependent statements that are empirically tested or based on extensive experience and are more restrictive and less general than principles, e.g. (Lauff et al, 2019;Valjak and Bojčetić, 2019).  AM rules are reliable statements derived from quantitative studies that relate to the expression of features (wall thickness, radii, etc.…”

Review of Design Heuristics and Design Principles in Design for Additive Manufacturing

“…The crowdsourced DP developed by Perez et al were later expanded and reformulated to support innovation with AM during early design stages and are formalised in the form of 27 AM Principle Cards (Lauff et al, 2019;Perez, Hilburn, et al, 2019). Here the AM design knowledge is written with formal syntax and further described with schematics and examples.…”

“…compare all studies found on DH in the context of AM regarding the definition of DH provided in the study, the number of DH given, and the design phase where the DH are indented to be applied. (Lauff et al, 2019;Perez, Hilburn, et al, 2019). Here the AM design knowledge is written with formal syntax and further described with schematics and examples.…”