Development of a generic product design platform for household product design

Abstract

Many businesses belonging to product design and engineering sectors in southern China find it difficult to maintain commonality and economies of scale for products with strict customer design requirements, which greatly vary per contract or per piece. The design requirements are typically highly customized and costly to manufacture, involve small production runs, and require long delivery periods. This university - industry collaborative research project aims to develop a generic product design platform that will facilitate the design and manufacturing process of electronic and home appliances using our newly developed standard items management system and profile card concepts. The project is intended to benefit product design and manufacturing small and medium industries in southern China. This platform is a base for collecting, consolidating, and analyzing all necessary informationin - including design and engineering knowledge, components, requirements, technologies, and standards for a series of products - to build product architectures that can reduce the number of parts of products and the time to manufacture and assemble them, and that can streamline and simplify the conceptual design and embodiment design phases through the reuse of previous parts, components, and ideas.