Design Activity in Consumer Innovation Laboratory

Richard M. Mahoney, James W. Fee, Jr., William S. Harwin

Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories (ASEL)

University of Delaware/Alfred I. duPont Institute

Wilmington, Delaware USA

Abstract

The Consumer Innovation Laboratory has been actively engaging consumers in the product design process. This paper presents an overview of the consumer and staff project activity levels, as well as information about the types of activities and the design progress. Although no formal conclusions may be drawn at this stage, the data presented here may eventual form the basis for more efficient guidelines for consumer involvement in product design.

Background

This paper presents information about the design activities of the Consumer Innovation Laboratory, and the role of the participants in those activities. The Consumer Innovation Laboratory is a consumer-led and consumer-driven research effort designed to explore new methods of integrating consumer knowledge and expertise into a "total design process"[1]. The project, which began in 1993, is one of thirteen projects within the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Rehabilitation Robotics of the University of Delaware's Center for Applied Science and Engineering, located at the Alfred I. duPont Institute. The concept behind the Consumer Innovation Laboratory is to engage consumers to work as peers with staff engineers in the development of product solutions to everyday needs. In their team roles with the engineers, the consumers share in the responsibility for taking project ideas from their inception, through the development of working models, to their submission to manufacturers for commercialization.

Design Teams

The Consumer Innovation Laboratory currently supports three active design teams. Following is a short description of the objectives of each.

Eggbreaker: The goal of this team is to create a product that will break an egg and cleanly remove the contents for people with limitations in hand function.

Vacuum cleaner: The goal of this design team is to produce a more accessible method for vacuum cleaning, especially for people who use wheelchairs.

Pageturner: The goal of this design team is to create a next-generation pageturning device.

Design Activities

The Consumer Innovation Laboratory uses a total design process. All designs begin with a blank sheet of paper and progress through a series of stages. A short description of the activities of which follows.

Product Design Specification (PDS): This stage involves discussing the desired criteria for the end product. These criteria are independent of any form of the final product. In addition, the criteria are rated as either vital to the product or useful if possible. The top five or ten vital criteria are also identified.

Patent and Product Review: In order to determine whether the consumer need may already have been met, a review of pertinent patents and existing products takes place.

Market Evaluation: In this stage, effort is put into identifying more broadly what criteria potential consumers have for the product. The primary mechanism for this has been questionnaires.

Testing and Prototyping: The testing and prototyping stage begins with a series of brainstorming sessions. These sessions serve as the transition from PDS to form and function. Testing of some of the brainstorming ideas takes place and a prototype is developed based on the most promising solutions identified.

Technology Transfer: This stage involves identifying and discussing with potential manufacturers of the product.

Design Status

The status of each design team is described in Figure 1. For each design team, the level of activity (in total hours per project month) per team member is shown. In addition, a bar graph along the top indicates the design activity that took place during those months. These graphs, therefore, indicate the length of time a project has been running, the various design activities accomplished, and the relative contribution of the various team members during those activities.

The eggbreaker project has been active for 21 months. As shown, the activity of this project has oscillated somewhat, which is reflected in the team's progress.

The data displayed for the vacuum cleaner project shows that in the beginning of the PDS stage, the consumer input was relatively high. This input, however, gradually reduced and leveled off. During the specification and construction of the prototype, the engineering staff input was quite high. It is interesting to note that the consumer activity rises slightly after the engineering activity. This indicates the time spent by consumers evaluating the prototype.

Although it is still early in the project, the pageturner design activity appears to be following that of the vacuum cleaner project. Another observation is that the amount of time required to create the PDS appears to be dropping with each new design team. This may be a reflection of the experience being gained with each successive design in more efficiently moving through this process.

Figure 2 shows the total number of hours spent by the design team members on each project. In total, 663 consumer hours, 988 hours by engineering staff, and 152 hours for administrative support has been spent on the detailed design activities of the three design projects combined.

Conclusions

It is hoped that by examining the activity levels of the design team members, an efficient methodology for consumer-initiated design will develop. The data shown in Figure 1 suggests that different design activities require different input.

A missing element that will enable this to be more meaningful is a measurement of the effect of the design activity on the quality of the design. Attempts will be made to identify such a parameter as the designs continue to be monitored. References [1] J.W. Fee, Jr., L.J. Fee, R.S. Piech (1995). The Consumer Innovation Laboratory: An Exercise in Consumer Empowerment. in Proceedings of RESNA `95, Vancouver, B.C., Canada, June 9-14.

Acknowledgments

This research is supported by the U.S. Department of Education, Grant Number H129E20006 from the Rehabilitation Service Administration and Grant Number H133E30013 a Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on "Robotics to Enhance the Functioning of Individuals with Disabilities" from National Institute on Disability Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR).

The authors also acknowledge the contributions to this paper of Bob Piech, Jane Fee, Randy Glass, Whitney Sample, and Jim Brake.

Figure 2. Total hours contributed to design activities.

Richard M. Mahoney, James W. Fee, Jr., William S. Harwin Applied Science and Engineering Laboratories (ASEL) University of Delaware/Alfred I. duPont Institute Wilmington, Delaware USA Design Activity in the Consumer Innovation Laboratory Design Activity in Consumer Innovation Laboratory

Figure 1. Design activity charts for the three design projects. The x-axis represents the time into a design project (in months) and the y-axis indicates the total hours contributed to that activity during the month. The activity levels are broken down into consumers, engineering staff, and admin support. The bar graphs along the top indicate the periods during which a particular design activity was taking place.