Infusing Design Techniques-An Integrated Approach

Today's product design industries focus on continuous need for new, high quality and cost effective products. Recent surveys also showed that majority of problems with new products are not working as intended, taking too long to bring to market, or costing too much are the result of a poor design process. To address the afore mentioned issues product design teams are looking towards developing FoolProof solutions using design tools like Six Sigma Techniques, TRIZ etc. Among these TRIZ has been the predominantly used tool with fewer yields of results. This has made the Six sigma techniques to gain popularity in product development. This paper delineates content design of IPD course (for PG-Machine design) and effort in teaching and giving an experience of applying design tools/techniques to real world problems. An attempt was made to bridge the gap between Academia and Industry. In order to expose the students to real time problems, a course project as a selfstudy backed up by practical sessions on design tools was introduced. The sessions included explanation of each module/tool with aid of case study/team building activity. The course project was intended at students to unlearn the traditional design tools and learn tools viz. Industrial Design Sketching, Six sigma techniques with the aid of MINITAB software. Based on the industrial experience of the Instructors, the course/practical session content was framed in a way that offered students to learn, apply tools/techniques to real world problems to understand complications and minimize design errors, which also met the objective of industry ready students. Arun Y. Patil1 Asst. Professor, Mechanical Engineering Department B. V. Bhoomaraddi college of engineering, Vidya nagar, Hubli, Karnataka. 1arun_p@bvb.edu The outcome of this exercise yielded into several novel ideas. Out of which two ideas were processed for filing a patent. This study helped instructor to ascertain how effectively the integration of sketching and different six sigma tools can be made, to influence the students learning and demonstration capability.


Introduction
Scenario in several industries is currently undergoing a transformation that is guiding it from the quality era to that of innovation.This transformation necessitates changing design practices, the foundations of which currently rest on design techniques.An innovation oriented approach would require that the basis of the design action contain other rules of invention where creativity and problem solving would have priority [1].Many reports emphasize the increasingly multidisciplinary nature of engineers' work, and the need for universities to train young engineers to work effectively with other disciplines [2,3,4].Industry demands engineers who are experienced in collaborating with other fields; innovation is often sparked by the intersection of multiple disciplines [5,6].Nowadays, a growing consensus is attributed to conceptual design in the perspective of developing effective and successful products; as a consequence, major efforts should be dedicated within the Computer-Aided Innovation field to correctly support this task.A particular line of evolution of these systems concern computer coaches, i.e. software applications capable to assist users along each step of design activities [7].
Organizations seeking to be innovative face many dilemmas.The main one is that, though it is necessary to innovate, innovation is a highly risky activity.The prevailing literature in this area tends to put emphasis on the external source for new product ideas-namely, the market [8].The focus of this paper is on the root of product innovation, which is new product ideation.
Any product design process should initiate with some generic questions as revealed in the study by De Lean et al [9].The preliminary questions raised were; Firstly, How do first-year engineering students view creativity and its role in engineering?Secondly, what opportunities do students see for creativity in their engineering design projects?Finally, how do various factors, including the course structure and the instructor, influence student choices to pursue creative opportunities?In order to address these requirements, a design process was framed which follows the generic product development process.
The current focus was on post-graduate students who come from different mechanical streams should work in multidisciplinary teams quite remarkable and valuable to their career building in industry.Moreover, in order to advance the design techniques of mechanical model, this study proposed a verification system, and recapitulated the items to be improved.In addition, this study proposed specific implications and amend the model based on the connection between the teaching model and Industry design focuses, in order to achieve the goal of teaching design, improving teachers' creative teaching quality, cultivating a positive attitude towards innovation in the students, and further enhancing their creative ability.

Brief Outline of The Subject
Recent surveys showed that majority of problems with new products are not working as intended, taking too long to bring to market, or costing too much are the result of a poor design process.To address the afore mentioned issues Integrated product design taught as per early curriculum has been transformed into a industry oriented with focus on design techniques currently used in industries.Even the academic subjects are not much in correlation with industrial work.These issues are addressed in the newly framed Integrated Product Design curriculum.Table 1 gives a brief idea about the newly framed course structure.Newly framed curriculum structure was dealt for 50 hours with 4 credits i.e. it was of 4 hours per week of class room sessions.In addition to this a self study component of 1 credit was included.This mainly focuses on practical sessions and how to develop the product with right design approach as well as right design technique usage.

Course Project (Self Study)
The course project was introduced to students for what they have learned in class lectures are they able to work on those design techniques without any hiccups.As the trial version shouldn't burden the students, course project is assigned to a group of two members rather than individual.The group was formed to work up on new novel ideas and make a concept model of pre illusion idea in their mind.Every fortnight a interaction sessions, project reviews were conducted to make sure the groups are moving in right direction.The course project pre-class room practical sessions are arranged as per the table 2. Course Project Theme: Identify a consumer product/House hold product as needed by the market, develop concept, develop CAD model, simulate in CAE environment, optimize, develop tooling and make a physical prototype.Prepare a detailed report.

Methodology
The main purpose of this study was to develop feasible design techniques as a blend between fundamental design concepts and creative learning tools.This study summarized the teaching design contents which are essential for any beginner or a new entrant to industry arena.The tools are so much effective in establishing the right quantum of results within a short span of time.

Review of Research:
Prior conducting the design technique sessions a feedback was collected which clearly showed limitations in terms of the capability of the designer's perspective, techniques and technical know-how resulting in the overlooking of aspects relevant to the problem.This activity showed a large gap between mastering the techniques and not knowing the techniques.This showed the path to be covered during the course of the subject.Depending on the existing knowledge of the students they were asked to rate the tools between 1 and 5 Scale as shown in the Table .4

Feedback survey:
A preliminary study on the knowledge of design techniques was checked for students.The list of techniques is as shown in the table 4. The study revealed that a mere 1.91 was the average out of 5 rating for the entire batch comprising of 18 students.The feedback (pre-test) report as depicted in Table 6 made clear for the initial stage itself that there is lot of scope for improvement and leveraging the knowledge of students in this arena.The feedback showed us that students were below average knowledge in case of Perspective sketching, Pareto chart, Logic Tree, Tear down method and Poka-yoke method.The results yielded some interesting facts, as whole batch came to PG from mechanical stream in their under graduate level and still haven't come across the techniques.The assessment showed numerous things.First, student responses on the surveys and results of indicated design techniques showed that they haven't come across any tool usage and their importance during the previous education.Second, the topics covered under the course material and application of the course content to real world relevance are on the bottom.

Approach
Following section discusses various techniques chosen for classroom teaching and exercises students have carried out as a part of course assignment.

Design Techniques:
There are numerous techniques, mostly underlying statistics, in use mostly for on-line product or process quality control.Such utilization of tools indeed helps in improving quality of the product/process, but add up to the cost as it involves different specific tasks.Further, firsttime right is the principal approach many industries adapt so as to lessen costs due to design changes.A set of design techniques, as listed in Table 6, were selected for class discussion based on their ease, utility and advantages.
Exercises: a. Perspective Sketching For a designer the basic ability one must has is to present his idea to the client.Sketching helps designer to quickly exhibit graphical representation of the idea to his/her clients.This exercise focused mainly on free-hand& perspective sketching, as it was observed that most of the students, though have undergone machine drawing course, but lack in presenting the ideas using free hand sketches.Students were given few assignments to enhance the quick presentation ability through sketches.

Results and Discussion
The Results were validated with a help of self study component.The self-study component comprised of a course project with two students in each group.Each team were supposed to decide upon a theme and do write proper problem definition.Then, start working on the concept with a help of team building activity, brainstorming activity and to generate a number of concepts.While doing so they were supposed to use the design technique tools, in turn it was helping for their quick completion of the task.In between all the queries were addressed by the mentor to work effectively and accurately on the design techniques.Finally, each team would be coming out with their novel solutions, which definitely would be good concepts yielding in a better future product to society.
By conducting this course project work we have achieved two objectives.Firstly, the students were able to apply the knowledge what they have gained through class lectures and secondly their interaction with customers for finding out the problems or field issues occurring in current scenario helped them directly access the first hand information on market needs.These tasks made them to update themselves with current requirements and know how the techniques used to address the real time problems.When we had an opportunity to look through the feedback after the course project work, it was pretty much clear that students were able to understand and work up on all the techniques except the clay moulding.As due to time constraint clay moulding topic was not being covered during the course of the session.The rating reported post feedback yielded a value of 3.41 out of 5 scale rating.If we leave out clay modeling technique it comes around 3.45 out of 5 rating.So, the results were quite satisfying on the basis that there was a surge of 1.5 rating from 1.91 to 3.41 as shown in table 8.

Conclusion and Scope for future work
The study impacted on the students to face the interview either on campus or off campus in their career with the help of these design techniques.Students will be positive and affirmative about the design techniques while using them in real time problems at industry.The course helped students to unlearn the traditional design tools and learn new era tools viz.Industrial Design Sketching, Six sigma techniques with the aid of MINITAB software, TRIZ methodology etc.The work yielded into several novel ideas during the course of idea generation.Out of which two ideas were processed for filing a patent under Indian Territory.
The results presented in this paper suggest that the infusion approach is superior to the traditional approach for teaching engineering problem solving.The TRIZ unit was also found to enhance students' problem solving selfefficacy significantly more than the four years of an engineering degree.It is concluded, that the most likely reasons for a success of the students can be judged once he inducted into industrial line and how he deliver the feedback to this subject.

Fig
Fig 1. Design process

Fig. 3
Fig.3 QFD Chart for a typical project work.c.Morphology Chart:

Table 1 .
Course structure as per design techniques 2.1 Integrated Product Design newly framed curriculum:

Table 2 .
Practical session as prerequisite to project

Table 4 .
Questionnaires asked before the class commencement

Table 5 .
Feedback Chart Before conducting the sessions

Table 6 .
List of Design Techniques

Table 7 .
Conversion of Customer needs into engineering characteristics.