An Innovative TRIZ-Based Methodology to Explore Design Conflicts for Collaborative Product Design

Abstract

Due to the product complexity and time constraint, it is common to conduct a collaborative design process to consider design requirements concurrently from the product lifecycle. However, such multi-disciplinary integration process may lead to potential design conflicts which has to be further resolved as the development continues. In this research, we propose a novel analytic model by combining the concepts of Ideal Final Result (IFR) and Trends analysis in TRIZ theory to systematically find the possible design contradictions from a top-down approach. The IFR is used to represent the integration of the developing product requirements which are requested from the collaborative team members. We then apply Trends analysis to compare the current state of existing product and the IFR state of the developing product. Therefore after comparison we will transform the differences into 39 engineering parameters defined in TRIZ to acquire possible design contradictions among components. The contributions of this methodology not only derive design conflicts systematically, but also help designers jump out of their psychological inertia and perform the design process with IFR to achieve distinct innovation.