Design Innovation With Additive Manufacturing: A Methodology

Additive manufacturing (AM) has matured rapidly in the past decade and has made significant progress towards a reliable and repeatable manufacturing process. The technology opens the doors for new types of innovation in engineering product development. However, there exists a need for a design process framework to efficiently and effectively explore these newly enabled design spaces. Significant work has been done to understand how to make existing products and components additively manufacturable, yet there still exists an opportunity to understand how AM can be leveraged from the very outset of the design process. Beyond end use products, AM-enabled opportunities include an enhanced design process using AM, new business models enabled by AM, and the production of new AM technologies. In this work, we propose the use, adaptation and evolution of the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre’s Design Innovation (DI) framework to assist organizations effectively explore all of these AM opportunities in an efficient and guided manner. We build on prior work that extracted and formalized design principles for AM. This paper discusses the creation and adaptation of the Design Innovation with Additive Manufacturing (DIwAM) methodology, through the combination of these principles and methods under the DI framework to better identify and realize new innovations enabled by AM. The paper concludes with a representative case study with industry that employs the DIwAM framework and the outcomes of that project. Future studies will analyze the effects that DIwAM has on designers, projects, and solutions.