Socialized and self-organized collaborative designer community-resilience modeling and assessment

Abstract

With the development of internet technology and sharing economic trend, a new kind of open, socialized, self-organized and collaborative product design mode (defined as community-based product design, CPD) has emerged and been successfully applied in the overall context of social manufacturing. However, due to the natural characteristics of CPD, the designer community (DC), which is the subject of the design process, is not always reliable and this limits the further application of CPD mode. This paper takes the first step to solve this problem by providing a systematic and comprehensive method to assess the resilience of the DC. Specifically, a six-stage DC-growing process has been proposed to present the generalized and ideal DC organization mechanism; three resilience manifestations have been concluded to define the resilience concept of DC; on this basis, a DC interaction relationship model and a DC design capability model, and corresponding DC-resilience assessment indicators and key member identification indicators have been established. The works can help stakeholders gain deeper insights on the resilience status of their DCs and thereby make better management strategies to improve the performance of their DCs. The method has been verified through a case study of three RepRap DCs.