Course Title: Introduction to Design and Innovation

Credit Structure L T P C
4 0 0 4
Prerequisites

By: Kamlesh Joshi

Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

(Institute of Infrastructure Technology Research and Management)
 Detailed Syllabus
Introduction: Introduction to design, modern product development process, reverse engineering and redesign, examples of product
development process.

Product Development Process Tool: Product development teams, team structures, team building, team valuation, product development
planning, scheduling tools.

Scoping Product Development: What to develop? Mission statement, Technical questioning, technical feasibility, S curve, Concept of ideal
design, conceptualizing product: Identifying the customer needs, understanding the customer needs, organizing & prioritizing customer needs,
affinity diagram, customer use pattern

Establishing Product Function: Functional decomposition, FAST method, creating function structure, function structure modelling process.

Product tear down and experimentation: Tear down process, tear down methods, application of product tear down.

Benchmarking & Engineering Specification: Benchmarking approach, example, supporting tool for benchmarking, intended assembly cost
analysis, function form diagram, setting product specifications, specification process, house of quality/quality function deployment(QFD).

Concept generation: Concept generation process, traditional brainstorming, brain ball method, C sketch/6-3-5 method, example.

Concept selection: Concept selection process, Pugh concept selection chart, concept screening and concept scoring.

Concept embodiment: process of concept of embodiment, advanced method, FMEA

Industrial design: Goal, importance of ID, assessment of quality of product based on ID, ID process, design challenges that ID
2
face,
technological or user driven products based on ID.
 Modern Product Development (PD)
A typical product development A reverse engineering and
process redesign PD process
•Develop a vision • Select a product
Understanding • Market opportunity Reverse • Develop a vision
• Customer need • Customer need
an opportunity Engineer
•Competitive analysis • Market opportunity

• Portfolio Planning • Competitive analysis

Develop a • Functional modeling Develop a • Functional modeling
concept • Product architecture Redesign • Product architecture
•Concept Engineering •Concept Engineering

• Embodiment Engg. • Embodiment Engg.

Implement a • Physical and analytical Implement a • Physical and analytical
concept Modeling Redesign Modeling
• Design for ‘X’ • Design for ‘X’
• Robust Design • Robust Design
Dr. Kamlesh Joshi, Assistant Professor, Dept. of ME (IITRAM) 3
Phase I: Understanding the opportunity

4
 Scoping Product Development
• What to develop?
• S- curves
• Technical questioning
• Mission statement

• Identifying the customer needs

• Customer satisfaction
• Gathering customer needs
• Organizing customer needs (Organizing/ Prioritizing)

5
 What to develop?
o A complete new technology
o Refinement of a current product
o Expansion and variation of current product

S-Curves: (Typical technological innovation time cycle)

Technological innovations typically manifest themselves into a market along an “s-curve” timeline beaviour

6
 S- curve and new product development

Stage-III
Stage-II Limit B

Stage-I B. New disruptive

technology
Performance

Complete new
product Limit A

Expansion
variation of
A. Old product
technology

Refinement of
current product

Time
Fig. S-curve for product development 7
Importance of studying S-Curves:

o To understand the competitive company Technological strategy:

o To adopt technological strategy Decision over what level of design to attack?

Create new Improve current

technology technology

8
What to develop?

9
Comments on S-Curves (Exceptions):

1. Moore’s law

Fig. Moore’s law (https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/)

2. Market boundary is not crisp:

10
 Technical questioning

Technical questioning (along with mission statements) are important first steps in the product design process.
They help in:-
Ex:
1. Focus design efforts
2. Define goals
3. Provide schedule for tasks
4. Finding: Technical risk, Market risk

 These questions force the design team to

think critically to restate the design task in
precise way.
 Help design team decide what to do next?

11
 Mission statement

Also known as market attack plan, a vision statement, or a product plan.

By Project manager ---------> Project team

12
 Mission statement

Ex.: Fingernail clipper

13
 Understanding the customer needs
Akia Morita: (Founder of Sony corporation)
“Our plan is to lead the public to new products rather than ask them what they want”

Result: Lost to JVC's VHS Cassette Recorder

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddYZITaxlTQ&feature=emb_logo

14
 Understanding the customer needs
Customer satisfaction: What customer want? How to know?

Problem 1: Making customer understand new product without actually showing new product and by showing old
product.

Problem 2: Customer only discusses about what they do not like in a product. It is hard to uncover the
expectations.

15
 Understanding the customer needs
Kano diagram: (Shiba, Graham, and Walden, 1993)

Delighted • Keno diagram forms background thinking

Satisfaction
Customer behind customer needs.

• The more product function implemented, the

more customer expects and it becomes harder to
keep delighting the customers.
Fully
Implemented Ex: Adding cup-holder in car, ABS in
Function vehicles
Absent

• Message from Keno’s diagram:

Customer’s expectation increases over
time. Therefore, it is good to keep in touch with
customers.

Disgusted

Fig. Kano diagram of customer satisfaction 16

 Understanding the customer needs

Customer Populations: (A customer population should be understood?)

Customer population is the set of persons whom we want to be purchasers of our new product.

 Different customer uses the product differently.

 Different customer have different objectives.
 Different customer operate product in different environment.
 Different customer have different expectations.

Different strategies should be adopted by companies to face such diversity for a single product.

17
 Understanding the customer needs
Categorization of customer populations:

• Category I: Statistically analyzing the customer response based on some criteria.

Average response, and Hard to achieve response.

• Category II: Use pattern among customer population (Demographics for market segments).
Geographical breakdown: Countries, climates, economics (for global market).
Socio-economic breakdown: Income, gender, marital status, age.

• Category III: Lead-lag usage (Products with rapid changing technology).

Lead-customers: Fraction of customer population at the leading edge to use the technology.
Ex: University students for computer technology

Lead-customers are important for a design team to identify and open a line of communication.

18
 Understanding the customer needs
Types of Customer needs:

1. Direct needs: Easily uncovered from customer

2. Latent needs: Typically not directly expressed by customers without probing. (Ex: Fast charging charger)

3. Constant needs: Intrinsic to the task of the product and always will be. (Ex: Camera Memory)

4. Variable needs: Not constant. May vanish with change in technology (Ex: Digital camera- Film storage life.)
Difficult to understand through discussions as the customer might not understand them.

5. General needs: These needs apply to every person in the customer population. (Ex: A.C. in Cars)

6. Niche needs: For smaller market segment within the entire population.
(Ex: Good quality music system in cars)

19
 Understanding the customer needs
Gathering Customer needs:

1. Interviews: Design team members discusses the needs with a single customer, one at a time.
Customer’s environment, Responses are recorded by audio/video mode.

2. Questionnaires: List of criteria relevant to customer’s concerns.

It forms a list of questions and then organizes the provided Reponses.

3. Focus groups: ( Robert K. Merton , Ernest Dichter)

• A moderator facilitates a session with a group of customers.
• The session is held in the product developer environment.
• Inside a room with two way mirror (design team can observe the customers)
• Expressions of customers are analyzed.
Results: Understanding of what to ask a customer, development of need list. Ex: Food industry.

4. Be the customer: Design teams travel to the locations where their/competitor product is used and will act as
customer.

Interviews provide most information, Focus groups are costly, questionnaires provide lowest quality information.
20
 Understanding the customer needs
Conducting Interviews:

• Like-dislike method:
• Articulate use method:

Like-dislike method: Interview the customer as they use the product. More detailed questions.

Team members ask the customer- What do they like? What they don’t like?
What must be provided to delight the customer?

Interviewer should ensure that customer tells both likes and dislikes.
Ask why to uncover latent needs.
Ask about customers consideration while purchasing? (Sales, Packaging, Marketing)
Ask how customer would change the product to make it better?

Like-dislike method is quick.

Not best for uncovering latent needs.
21
 Understanding the customer needs
Conducting Interviews:

Articulate use method: (Walk me through a typical session using the product.)

 Articulate-use method provides a means of obtaining the understanding for a design team that how a
product should be used. (for uncovering latent needs).

 Observe the steps from taking out the product to use it, to pack it back and keep it on the fixed place.

 Questions can be of like-dislike nature.

The important distinction here is to obtain the information on every step in the process of using the product.

The team should look for:

1. Aspects which worked well enough.
2. Aspects for which a different system is used to do the work.

These activities present latent opportunities to redesign the product.

22
 Understanding the customer needs
Organizing and prioritizing customer needs:
Customer’s needs can be different or the same need in different words or similar kind of needs. These needs are
required to place in groups of similar needs or similar sounding needs.

Grouping the needs:

• Affinity diagram method (Simple approach):

• Customer sort method (Statistical):

23
 Understanding the customer needs
Grouping the needs:

• Affinity diagram method:

24
 Understanding the customer needs
Grouping the needs:

• Customer sort method:

25
 Understanding the customer needs
Customer use patterns:

Any product has distinct activities that a user steps through using the product

Purchased Transported Removed from box Assembled Initiated

Thrown away Maintained Used

 In order to communicate with design teams these different customer use patterns should be captured.
 It helps in finding associate customer needs.

Make Customer use pattern:

• Capture the serial/Parallel sequence of chains of activities for each customer
• Card of needs from 1st customer.
• Compare with 2nd customer.
26
 Understanding the customer needs
Make Customer use pattern:
Capture the serial/Parallel sequence of chains of activities for each customer

Importance of activity diagram:

• Activity diagram can

communicate to any new and
different design team members.

• It creates a useful categorization

for the list of customer needs.

27