Patent-based creativity method for early design stages: case study in locking systems for medical applications

Abstract

Current product design processes are demanding functionality improvements, in order to make the difference in the market. This situation has led designers, engineers and specialist to work together in order to develop new methodologies that might reduce development time and support the quality in the product. In this connection, several tools and methodologies have been proposed over the last decade centred in the combination of industrial design techniques with functional engineering design. Many of these new solutions were based into the treatment of patents in order to reduce the analysis time in terms of existing solutions and how those solutions could be implemented into creation of new products. This article presents the development of a creativity method, based on combination and mutation models, that supports patent search and analysis in the early design stages. The use of this method will be portrayed into the design of the locking system of a medical device used for the treatment of the camptocormia.

Patent Data for Engineering Design: A Review

“…For instance, Verhaegen et al (2011) retrieved candidate patents as product precedents for analogical design by distilling product features. Rios-Zapata et al (2017) presented a creative design method that fuses combination and mutation models to support patent prior art search and analysis in early design stages. proposed a method for patent stimuli searching based on community detection within a patent class network.…”

Patent Data for Engineering Design: A Review

“…For instance, Verhaegen et al [44] retrieved candidate patents as product precedents for analogical design by distilling product features. Rios-Zapata et al [45] presented a creative design method that fuses combination and mutation models to support patent prior art search and analysis in early design stages. Song et al [18] proposed a method for patent stimuli searching based on community detection within a patent class network.…”

“…In these human studies, full patent documents were often directly provided to designers as design aids such as prior art solutions [11,24,26,25,27,29,30], or design stimuli [15,16,17,20,28,19] for engineering design. Besides, a group of qualitative studies adopted knowledge-based rules or strategies to boost computer-aided engineering design and developed rule-based expert systems [43,31,54,68,42,47,66,33,48,57,45,62,28,13,46,41,12,35]. These expert systems usually require designers to collaborate with algorithms to tackle specific problems.…”

Design Conception and Evaluation of an Unmanned Amphibious Aerial Vehicle Using Systematic Approach

“…Since the industrial design process is using user focus approaches, the non-addressable hitches of UAAV are resolved. In unconventional methodology, the new design's substantiation is critical (Ríos-Zapata et al, 2017). Hence, a systematic way of arriving at the vehicle's configuration is the eventual way to conceptualise UAAV.…”