Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM) has matured rapidly in the past decade and has made significant progress towards a reliable and repeatable manufacturing process. With its ability to create highly complex geometries from the digital representation of a part and circumvent many of the constraints of traditional manufacturing, AM is capable of producing previously non-viable or impossible products. The technology opens the doors for many new types of innovation in engineering product development. We however, lack a design process framework for efficiently and effectively exploring the new design spaces enabled by AM. Significant work has been done to understand how to make existing product and components additively manufacturable; yet there exists a significant opportunity to understand how new opportunities that leverage AM can be explored from the outset of the design process. Additionally, AM enables innovations beyond geometric freedoms to create new products. These additional opportunities include an enhanced design process using AM, new business models enabled by AM, and the production of new AM technologies. In this work, we propose the adaptation and use of the SUTD-MIT International Design Centre’s Design Innovation (DI) framework to help organizations effectively explore all of these opportunities in an efficient and guided manner with an emphasis on innovative solutions (B. A. Camburn, Auernhamer, et al., 2017). This work discusses the extraction and formalization of design principles for AM, the creation and adaptation of design methods for this purpose, and finally the combination of these principles and methods under the DI framework to better identify and realize a new wave of innovation enabled by AM.