Investigating perceived meanings and scopes of Design for Additive Manufacturing

The concept of Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) is gaining popularity along with AM, despite its scopes are not well established. In particular, in the last few years, DfAM methods have been intuitively subdivided into opportunistic and restrictive. This distinction is gaining traction despite a lack of formalization. In this context, the paper investigates experts' understanding of DfAM. In particular, the authors have targeted educators, as the perception of DfAM scopes in the future will likely depend on teachers' view. A bespoke survey has been launched, which has been answer by 100 worldwide-distributed respondents. The gathered data has undergone several analyses, markedly answers to open questions asking for individual definitions of DfAM, and evaluations of the pertinence of meanings and acceptations from the literature. The results show that the main DfAM aspects focused on by first standardization attempts have been targeted, especially products, processes, opportunities and constraints. Beyond opportunistic and restrictive nuances, DfAM different understandings are characterized by different extents of cognitive endeavor, convergence vs. divergence in the design process, theoretical vs. hands on approaches.