EVALUATION OF A STRATEGIC METHOD TO IMPROVE PROTOTYPE PERFORMANCE WITH REDUCED COST AND FABRICATION TIME
Year: 2015
Editor: Christian Weber, Stephan Husung, Marco Cantamessa, Gaetano Cascini, Dorian Marjanovic, Serena Graziosi
Author: Camburn, Bradley Adam; Jensen, Daniel; Crawford, Richard; Otto, Kevin; Wood, Kristin
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore; 2: United States Air Force ACADemy, United States of America; 3: The University of Texas at Austin, United States of America
Section: Design for X, Design to X
Page(s): 333-342
ISBN: 978-1-904670-67-4
ISSN: 2220-4334
Abstract
Prototyping is tied into many stages of product development, where implementation choices have critical effects on overall design outcome. We review six techniques for strategic prototyping and synthesize empirically derived heuristics for their application. The heuristics are integrated in a generalized method for strategic prototyping. Two complementary experiments are conducted to evaluate each technique, as well as one potential form of the method. Direct performance measurement quantifies the continued marginal performance increases associated with iteration (build and test cycle of a single concept), and the benefit of pursuing multiple design concepts. Results also show scaled prototyping, subsystem isolation, requirement relaxation, and virtual prototyping can reduce cost and fabrication time. The method is correlated with increased use of these techniques, and higher quantitative final performance. The strategy method is a broad planning tool that leads to improvement of final design performance and reducted fabrication cost and time. Potential areas for improvement are evaluation of: marginal benefits from many parallel concept tests, and alternate method layouts.
Keywords: Design Methods, Early Design Phases, Product Modelling, Models, Prototyping