The development of a design process for the digital manufacturing of personalised high value consumer products

This thesis explores the value adding capabilities of digital manufacturing technologies in the personalised consumer product industry with the intent to aid designers in making their processes more effective in achieving this goal. Digital manufacturing has increased the demand for more personalised products by providing a way in which the development of these personalised products results in increased quality and overall consumer satisfaction. One of the ways digital manufacturing facilitates personalisation is by enabling increased consumer involvement in the product design process with the guidance of designers. A long-standing challenge has been when, where, and to what extent consumers should be involved in the design of products with the prevalent practise amongst designers being to limit the involvement of consumers to cosmetic modifications. The challenge though is how designers are able to determine the when, the where, and the extent of consumer involvement based on the design processes they employ.

An extensive literature review covering digital manufacturing (with additive manufacturing as the primary method of production), product personalisation, and consumer value in product design found that design processes which fully integrate these concepts with advanced manufacturing methods have been slow to emerge in response to this growing phenomenon. Design processes developed for the digital manufacture of personalised consumer products were found to have been documented as a result of the process of designing and manufacturing a product, and not as a tool to improve on the efficacy of the process. Other processes were found to be general in their approach providing only an overview of how designers are to engage with the digital manufacturing technology. Finally, the way in which digital design processes are documented was found to be unsatisfactory as it made them difficult to locate in research, and in most instances results which had positive outcomes were those which provided research findings on an identified problem and the digital design process being only recorded to demonstrate the sequence of operations in the project.

Interviews with industry professionals in the area of personalised consumer products, from both a digital manufacturing perspective and a conventional manufacturing perspective, were used to collect data on how they developed their products. These different approaches to product development were analysed to determine their strengths and limitations in their application, and the results of the analysis were used to develop a model of a Digital Design Process (DDP) used in the personalisation of high-value consumer products.

The DDP model was then subjected to industry experts for analysis and testing for further refinement to address any inconsistencies within the framework of the model.

The research concluded that the development of a digital design process to personalise high-value consumer products demonstrated the need for such a practical and effective way of managing the product development process for designers practising in the digital manufacturing environment.