Structure sharing for resource effective solutions: Improving measures to account for importance and quality of functions
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Ghazanfari, Ehsan; Singh, Vishal
Series: ICED
Institution: Aalto University, Finland
Section: Design Theory and Research Methodology
Page(s): 111-120
ISBN: 978-1-904670-95-7
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
Structured sharing is believed to improve resource effectiveness of design solutions by allowing multiple functions to be achieved from the same shared structure. The current measures for assessing structure sharing and resource effectiveness account for the number of functions and structures in the solutions, but they do not take into account some of the basic aspects of functions from the customer and user perspective, which may determine whether the structure shared solution is desirable or not. This paper addresses this gap by improving the existing measures of structure sharing and resource effectiveness to take into account: (1) Relative importance of the different functions performed by the product (2) Quality of functions, which answers how well are the functions in the structure shared products performed when compared to a typical non-structured product serving the same function, and (3) emergent negative functions in the shared product that did not exist in the non-shared counterparts. The paper presents the derived equation, findings from the empirical tests conducted to test and validate the developed measures, and implications and recommendations for future research.
Keywords: Design for X (DfX), Decision making, Design methodology, Design process