Enhancing Creative Redesign Through Multimodal Design Heuristics for Additive Manufacturing

When designing for additive manufacturing (AM), designers often need assistance in breaking out of their conventional manufacturing mind-set. Previously, the authors derived design heuristics for AM (DHAM) to assist designers in doing this during the early phases of the design process. This study proposes a set of 25 multimodal cards and objects to accompany each of the design heuristics for AM and studies their effect through a series of controlled, novice user studies conducted using both teams and individuals who redesign a city E-Bike. The resulting AM concepts are analyzed in terms of the quantity of design modifications relevant for AM, AM flexibility, novelty, and variety. It is found that the DHAM cards and objects increase the inclusion of AM concepts, AM modifications, and the unique capabilities of AM in the concepts generated by both individuals and teams. They also increase the creativity of the concepts generated by both individuals and teams, as measured through a series of defined metrics. Furthermore, the objects in combination with the cards are more effective at stimulating the generation of a wider variety of designs than the cards alone. Future work will focus on studying the use of the DHAM cards and objects in an industrial setting.