Host and Derivative Product Modeling and Synthesis

Abstract

In recent years, numerous methods to aid designers in conceptualizing new products have been developed. These methods intend to give structure to a process that was, at one time, considered to be a purely creative exercise. Resulting from the study, implementation, and refinement of design methodologies is the notion that both the structure of the development process and the structure of the developed product are key factors in creating value in a firm’s product line. With respect to the latter key factor, product architecture, but more specifically, modular product architecture has been the subject of much study. However, prior research in the area of modular product architecture has, with limited exception, focused on the construction of modules that are to be incorporated into a product before it becomes available to its end-users; that is, the modules are incorporated ‘pre-market.’ The research contained in this thesis is focused on two tasks: advancing the notion of a modular product architecture in which modules can be incorporated into a product ‘post-market,’ and creating a method that aids designers in synthesizing these post-market modules. Researchers have examined the idea of post-market modules; however, they do not fully formalize language used to describe these modules, and they also do not give the product space created by post-market modularization well-defined boundaries. Additionally, the prior work gives no method that can be used to create post-market modules. The research presented here addresses these shortcomings in the prior work by first, defining the terms ‘derivative product’ and ‘host product’ to describe the post-market module and the product that the module augments, respectively. Second, by establishing three guidelines that are used to assess the validity of potential derivative products, giving the newly termed host and derivative product space defined boundaries. And lastly, by developing a 7-step, biomimetic-based methodology that can be used to create derivative product concepts (post-market modules). This developed methodology is applied to four case studies in which it is used to create five derivative product concepts for a given host product. Thus, 20 derivative product concepts are developed in this study, demonstrating the qualitative effectiveness of the 7-step methodology.