Exploring the Manifestation of Design for Manufacturing Heuristics in Students' Early-Stage Engineering Design Concepts

Additive manufacturing (AM) can produce designs in a manner that greatly differs from the methods used in the older, more familiar technologies of traditional manufacturing (TM). As an example, AM's layer-by-layer approach to manufacturing designs can lead to the production of intricate geometries and make use of multiple materials, made possible without added manufacturing cost and time due to AM's “free complexity.” Despite this contrasting method for manufacturing designs, designers often forgo the new design considerations for AM (AM design heuristics). Instead, they rely on their familiarity with the design considerations for TM (TM design heuristics) regardless of the intended manufacturing process. For designs that are intended to be manufactured using AM, this usage of TM design considerations is wasteful as it leads to unnecessary material usage, increased manufacturing time, and can result in designs that are poorly manufactured. To remedy this problem, there is a need to intervene early in the design process to help address any concerns regarding the use of AM design heuristics. This work aims to address this opportunity through a preliminary exploration of the design heuristics that students naturally leverage when creating designs in the context of TM and AM. In this study, 117 students in an upper-level engineering design course were given an open-ended design challenge and later tasked with self-evaluating their designs for their manufacturability with TM and AM. This evaluation of the students' designs was later repeated by relevant experts, who would identify the common design heuristics that students are most likely to use in their designs. Future studies will build on these findings by cementing early-stage design support tools that emphasize the significant heuristics found herein. For example, this work found that the design heuristic “incorporating complexity” was the most significant indicator of designs most suited for AM and should therefore be highly encouraged/emphasized when guiding designers in the use of AM. In doing so, it will be possible for early-stage design support tools to maximally improve designs that are intended to be manufactured for AM.