Product Design Data Management

Creating good design is a cooperative teamwork of different participants from industrial design, to engineering up to marketing. Each person involved in the design process creates information that has to be shared to or referenced to or even integrated with the information of the others. While traditionally industrial or product design results have been documented on paper, modern Computer Aided systems allow a digital representation of product design results and their appropriate presentation. Actually there are already many systems build on data bases to manage documents of different types (e.g. textual, 2D, 3D) within the engineering design process. But managing design data is surely more than using document or team data management (TDM) systems. Referring to the engineering domain so called engineering data management (EDM) or product data management (PDM) systems are a quasi standard in modern product development process to manage the engineering data and relevant processes and of course collaborative, interdisciplinary and international product development as well. Modern product data management concepts extend the approach of data management to product lifecycle management (PLM). PLM manages holistically all activities during the product lifecycle to drive continuous product and process innovation and improvement. Could the approach of these engineering-driven PDM/PLM concepts satisfy the industrial design management’s requirements too? The paper analyses requirements and benefits of PDM/PLM from industrial designer’s and design management’s point of view and it will introduce the idea and a concept for product design data management (PDDM).