Infusing Design Techniques - An Integrated Approach

Today's product design industries focus on continuous need for new, high quality and cost effective products. Recent surveys also showed that majority of problems with new products are not working as intended, taking too long to bring to market, or costing too much are the result of a poor design process. To address the afore mentioned issues product design teams are looking towards developing Fool- Proof solutions using design tools like Six Sigma Techniques, TRIZ etc. Among these TRIZ has been the predominantly used tool with fewer yields of results. This has made the Six sigma techniques to gain popularity in product development.

This paper delineates content design of IPD course (for PG-Machine design) and effort in teaching and giving an experience of applying design tools/techniques to real world problems. An attempt was made to bridge the gap between Academia and Industry. In order to expose the students to real time problems, a course project as a selfstudy backed up by practical sessions on design tools was introduced. The sessions included explanation of each module/tool with aid of case study/team building activity. The course project was intended at students to unlearn the traditional design tools and learn tools viz. Industrial Design Sketching, Six sigma techniques with the aid of MINITAB software. Based on the industrial experience of the Instructors, the course/practical session content was framed in a way that offered students to learn, apply tools/techniques to real world problems to understand complications and minimize design errors, which also met the objective of industry ready students.

The outcome of this exercise yielded into several novel ideas. Out of which two ideas were processed for filing a patent. This study helped instructor to ascertain how effectively the integration of sketching and different six sigma tools can be made, to influence the students learning and demonstration capability.