CONCEPT GENERATION

ANDIRA TASLIM 2019

 PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
KARL T. ULRICH AND STEVEN D. EPPINGER
5TH EDITION, IRWIN MCGRAW-HILL, 2012.

Chapter Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2. Development Processes and Organizations
3. Opportunity Identification
4. Product Planning
5. Identifying Customer Needs
6. Product Specifications
7. Concept Generation
8. Concept Selection
9. Concept Testing
10. Product Architecture
11. Industrial Design
12. Design for Environment
13. Design for Manufacturing
14. Prototyping
A concept is usually expressed as a

A CONCEPT
sketch or as a rough three-
dimensional model and is often
accompanied by a brief textual
description

Customer Needs

Product Specifications
COMMON DISFUNCTION EXHIBITED BY DEVELOPMENT TEAMS
DURING CONCEPT GENERATION INCLUDE

Consideration of only one or two alternatives, often proposed by the most assertive members of the
team

Failure to consider carefully the usefulness of concepts employed by other firms in related and
unrelated products.

Involvement of only one or two people in the process, resulting in lack of confidence and
commitment by the rest of the team

Ineffective integration of promising partial solution

Failure to consider entire categories of solutions

 A FIVE STEP METHODS
2. Serach externally:
• Lead users
• Experts
• Patents
• Literature Existing
• Benchmarking Concepts
1. Clarify the problem
• Understanding
5. Reflect on the
• Problem decomposition 4. Explore
• Focus on critical sub-
solutions and the
systematically:
problem • Classification trees
process:
• Contructive feedback
Combination table

3. Search internally: New Concepts

• Individual
• group
 HINTS FOR GENERATING SOLUTION
CONCEPTS

Set
Make Use related
quantitative
analogies stimuli
goals

Use Use the

Wish and
unrelated gallery
wonder
stimuli method
 EXPLORE SYSTEMATICALLY

Concept Classification Tree

Concept Combination Tree