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1. Products development … until now. “…" .. Giovanni Torres MSc Mechanical Engineer

2. Design process • Regardless of the product being developed or changed, or the industry, there is a generic set of phases that must be accomplished for all projects.

3. Opportunity identification • Before the original design or redesign of a product can begin, the need for it must be established. • There are three primary sources for design projects: technology, market, and change. • Regardless of the source, a common activity at most companies is maintaining a list of potential projects. • Since companies have limited people and money, the second activity, after identifying the products, is choosing which of them to work on.

4. Project Planning • The second phase is to plan so that the company’s resources of money, people, and equipment can be allocated and accounted for. • Planning needs to precede any commitment of resources; however, as with much design activity, this requires speculating about the unknown—and that makes the planning for a product that is similar to an earlier product easier than planning for a totally new one. • Since planning requires a commitment of people and resources from all parts of the company, part of the planning is forming the design team. (few products or even subsystems of products are designed by one person. ) • Much planning work goes into developing a schedule and estimating the costs. • The final goal of the activities in this phase is generating a set of tasks that need to be performed and a sequence for them.

5. Consumer products • Consumer products are products designed for use by the general public whereas commercial products are products used to produce goods and services. • Consumer products are different from commercial products in several respects as far as the user is concerned: • the user is generally untrained • the user often works unsupervised • he/she is part of a diverse population • In the early twentieth century, consumer products were primarily designed to provide functionality. Later, the form and appearance began to be emphasized. • During the 1980s, designers started emphasizing user friendliness of consumer products. Requirements such as product-user interface design and safety were incorporated into the design. • Concern for the environment and resource utilization in recent years has stimulated new awareness among users to seek products that pose minimal risk of environmental pollution, consume less energy, have very little toxic emissions during use, and are recyclable when disposed.

6. Usable consumer products • Survival of a company in these times of increased global competition depends upon developing high quality products at affordable cost. • A hard to use product, even one with many functions, will fall by the way side. • Usability of a product is generally determined by how easily and completely it meets the users’ needs. • The criteria for usability have, however, been gradually changing. Recent trends, such as increased customer demand to satisfy personal needs, are forcing the manufacturers to design a variety of usable products customized to individual needs. • As a result of an increased environmental awareness, customers also are seeking products that are environment friendly, energy efficient, and recyclable. • These changes in usability need to be reflected in the design of a product and the selection of processes to achieve its manufacture: The process of designing and manufacturing consumer products is greatly influenced by the needs and demands of the customers.

7. Criteria for designing and manufacturing usable consumer products • Functionality. • Ease of operation. • Aesthetics • Reliability • Maintainability/Serviceability • Environment friendliness • Recyclability/Disposability • Safety • Customizability • To fulfill these needs and wants, consumer products need to be designed to incorporate those features that meet the user requirements and then manufactured by appropriate selection of materials, processes, and tools

8. Usable consumer products1. functionality • The design activity is usually preceded by obtaining information about the needs and wants of the users through market research. • Conceptual design involves creation of synthesized solutions in the form of products that satisfy users’ perceived needs through the mapping between the functional requirements in the functional domain and the design parameters in the physical domain, through proper selection of design parameters that satisfy the functional requirements. • The functionality is basically about the existence of elements that meet the performance needs of the customer wants, ie the product's ability to meet the functional requirements specified by the user. This involves creation of synthesized solutions in the form of products, systems, components and other types of functions that satisfy the perceived needs of the user..

9. Usable consumer products2. ease of operation • A product is considered user friendly if the functions allocated to humans are within the limitations of their abilities and constraints, and the product-user interface is physically comfortable and mentally not stressful. • The system should be easy to learn, easy to remember and relatively error free. • The consumer electronic products are becoming more graphical user interface intensive in recent years that is made possible by incorporation of growing size of embedded software. Product quality in such products is greatly influenced by the software quality. • The consumer product can be finally tested for its ease of use by usability testing procedures such as thinking aloud method where users work on a prototype .

10. Usable consumer products3. Aesthetics • A customer’s perception of a product’s value is, in part, based upon its aesthetic appeal. • An attractive product may create an aesthetic appeal and a sense of high fashion, image, and pride of ownership. • The design of products should induce a positive sensual feeling.

11. Usable consumer products4. Reliability • Functionality and user-friendliness, designed into the product, implies that the product is able to perform the desired functions without posing excessive demands on the user at any given time. • The ability of the product to function satisfactorily over a period of time is indicated by its reliability. • Reliability of a product is the probability that it will perform satisfactorily for a specified period of time under a stated set of conditions. • Reliability improvement is usually achieved through continuous improvement in materials, product design, manufacturing processes and use environment. • It is either technically difficult or prohibitively expensive to produce fail proof products. Every consumer is aware of the fact that during the life span of the product, repair or maintenance service will be needed.

12. Usable consumer products5. Serviceability /maintainability • A product that can be repaired or serviced easily and quickly has a high maintainability. Serviceability and maintainability can be considered as equivalent terms. • Maintainability / serviceability is the element of product design concerned with assuring the ability of the product to perform satisfactorily throughout its intended useful life span with minimum expenditure of effort and money. • Maintenance can either be preventive maintenance (regular or routine service required for preventing operating failures) or breakdown maintenance (repair service after some failure or decline of function has occurred). Designing for good serviceability means providing for ease of both these kinds of maintenance. • There is a strong overlap between the objective of achieving high product serviceability and other desirable design objectives such as reliability and ease of assembly/disassembly.. • Easy serviceability can often compensate for lower reliability. If a component is prone to failure but can be easily replaced or repaired, the consequences of failure are less severe..

13. Usable consumer products6. Environmental friendliness • The consumers are demanding ‘green’ products as a result of a new environmental awareness and the responsibility of the manufacturers is gradually expanding over the entire product life cycle. • A design that has minimal or no harmful effects during manufacture, use and disposal is considered environment friendly. • Life cycle assessments (LCA) tools have been developed to analyze and compare the environmental impact of various product designs. • LCAs review a product by summing up the influence of all the processes during the life of a product on various environmental impact classes such as ozone depletion, global warming, smog, acidification, eutrophication, heavy metals, pesticides and carcinogenic.

14. Usable consumer products7. Recyclability /disposability • Thousands of consumer goods come to the end of their useful life every day and joins the waste stream. To deal with such a situation it is imperative that the products are designed for recyclability. • The considerations for design for recyclability often overlap with the considerations for design for disassembly. • Some design recommendations focuses on enhancing the product design by minimizing the disassembly cost and time involved in the overall product cycle. • A cost benefit analysis can be a tool for assessing the economics of designing for recyclability. The cost of recycling includes cost of disassembly, shredding, material recovery and dumping. The total benefit from recycling includes revenue from used parts, revenue from used parts and recovered material, and benefit of emission reduction from energy saving. .

15. Usable consumer products8. Safety • The increasing number of complaints each year due to injury during use of consumer products indicates that safety may be the primary consideration in the design of products for human as well as in terms of costs. • “Safety” implies absence of hazards or the minimal exposure to them during entire life cycle of the product.

16. Usable consumer products9. Customizability • So far, the aim of product design and development has been to create a product that satisfies the needs of the average customer. No consideration has been given to differences in individual tastes and preferences. Often, customers are willing to pay more if their individual needs are better satisfied. • Design for mass customization (DFMC) is a new approach to producing an increasing variety of customer’s requirements without a corresponding increase in the cost and lead-time • Providing products and services which best serve the customers’ needs while maintaining mass production efficiency is a new paradigm for industries. The recognition of each customer as an individual and the subsequent production of products with tailor-made features is the basis of this new approach. • The core of DFMC is to develop a mass customization oriented product family architecture (PFA)

17. Bibliografía • ULLMAN, David G. TheMechanicalDesignProcess, FourthEdition, 427 pages, McGraw-Hill, 2010. • ULRICH, Karl T. Diseño y desarrollo de productos. Enfoque multidisciplinario, Tercera edición, 366 páginas. Mc Graw Hill, México D.F., 2004 • DYM, Clive L. El proceso de diseño en ingeniería, Primera edición, 327 páginas, LimusaWiley, Mexico D.F., 2002.