Manufacturing for Design: A sustaining approach to drive manufacturing process evolution, then innovation

摘要

Often today’s designers are relegated to degrade their own output to realize mass production on existing manufacturing capital equipment. These considerations are typically encoded in the design process through “Design for Manufacturing” where constraints on the production processes available and limits to each manufacturing approach are ideally considered early in design. This Design for Manufacturing guise inhibits true designer creativity and the possibility to realize truly revolutionary products. In this paper, the authors formalize their previous introduction of the concept of Manufacturing for Design (MFD), a framework whereby product design creativity is used instead as a motive force of innovation to rethink manufacturing process approaches and assist in facilitating real innovation in manufacturing. This is not proposed as a replacement for DFM, but an extension that can help “question” the manufacturing-based requirements during the development process. It is clear that existing machines cannot be abandoned, but one can instead consider an intermediate augmentation step to feasibly enhance existing capital, to realize new designs in new materials, or to achieve new functional requirements and desires. The blending of MFD and DFM strategies (a proposed MFD|DFM approach) can lead to feasible evolution of manufacturing, and ultimately disruptive process innovation, defined as a rethinking of manufacturing rather than just improvement on existing solutions. Herein is reported the integration of the MFD|DFM concept to two separate education programs, one undergraduate and one graduate. These programs are independent but share resources together with those of an Advanced Manufacturing technical college program to educate students across disciplines and curricula in the dichotomy of Design and Manufacturing, and how the concepts can be properly considered together.