Integrated product/process design of branded products

Design of branded products involves consideration of both perceptual aspects of the product appearance (related to consumers’ evaluation and emotions and the brand values) as well as the technical and engineering aspects including manufacturing feasibility, performances, and cost. Within a multidisciplinary design context, product designers and engineering designers need to collaborate and communicate together to achieve a satisfactory product that is emotionally appealing to the consumers and is technically performing the intended functions, and is feasible to manufacture. However, such collaboration between product designers and engineering designers is difficult due to their different knowledge background, work approaches and responsibilities during the design process. This research deals with the questions of how to support the communication between product designers and engineering designers and how to support the integration of the engineering viewpoint earlier in the design process of branded product. Proposition and evaluation of three potential approaches to support communication between product designers and engineering designers is investigated in this research. Likewise an integration approach is proposed following the three steps of modeling, transforming and integrating the engineering knowledge to design knowledge. The results of this research contribute to the SKIPPI project, in the development of a software to support idea generation and the decision-making in the upstream design phase.

PhD Student: Golnoosh RASOULIFAR
Grenoble University, 2011
Directors: Daniel BRISSAUD and Guy PRUDHOMME

Link to the manuscript