Expanding the industrial design space through production innovation(s)

Over the decades, manufacturing firms have tried to Design for Manufacturability merely by exhorting industrial design engineers to create more producible-designs. This is most often achieved by considering the available manufacturing system capability for the product development, and it is common to run into troubles in many cases due to barriers to integrate product definition and manufacturing operations. In this paper, authors aim to explore how production innovations (as new manufacturing capabilities) can contribute to an increased industrial design space for product design engineers, enabling more design freedom while still obtaining producibility through removing and/or loosening constraints over product designs. The findings of a series of industrial case studies presented in this paper show promising outcomes on how production innovations can influence positively the expansion of the solution space of industrial design engineers. In addition, manufacturing engineers are driven to explore new materials, new manufacturing processes and new manufacturing (working) methods to support product innovation.