Guiding conceptual design through functional space exploration

Abstract

Conceptual design is an early stage in the product design process, which has an essential effect on the product innovation. Existing approaches for conceptual design always focus on the mapping processes, such as function–behavior–structure, function–behavior–state, or function–effect–solution, etc. The function, effect, solution, behavior, structure, and state all have influential factors in the above mapping processes. The enlargement of functional space, effect space, solution space, behavior space, structure space, state space, and problem-solving space can bring more opportunities to product innovation. This paper is devoted to functional space exploration in conceptual design. Each function has its own hierarchies and configurations, as well as each effect has its own multivariate influential factors, both of which can provide tremendous and exploitable space of creative concepts. The problem-solving space will be enlarged through the functional space exploration, which can obviously bring more opportunities for product innovation. This paper is devoted to presenting a systematic approach based on the reasoning of functional space exploration to increase opportunities for product innovation in conceptual design. A process of functional space exploration is treated as a three-step process, first transforming original function to derivative functions, then mapping these derivative functions to effects, and finally exploiting these effects to quantitative or qualitative physical quantity space. The functional design of new devices for decreasing resistance of amphibious vehicles is given as an example, which demonstrates that the methodology is obviously helpful to increase opportunities for product innovation in conceptual design.