When design never ends - a future scenario for product development

One of the foundations of product design is the separation of the design process and production (i.e. mass manufacturing). This separation manifests as designers going through a rigorous process aspiring to create fixed archetypes that are then replicated in the thousands or even millions. Today innovation and technological change are challenging this idea of a product design process that ends and hands over to manufacturing. The evolution of 3D Printing into Additive Manufacturing (AM) is challenging the notion of mass manufacture and consumer value. As AM advances in capability and capacity, the ability to economically manufacture products in low numbers with high degrees of personalisation poses questions of the accepted product development process. Removing the need for dedicated expensive tooling for mass manufacture also eliminates the cyclical timescales and commitment to fixed designs that investment in tooling demands. The ability to alter designs arbitrarily, frequently and responsively means that the traditional design process need not be applied and because of this, design processes and practice might be radically different in the future. In this paper, we explore this possible evolution by drawing parallels with the principles and development models found in software development.