Abstract Applications for additive manufacturing (AM) continue to increase as more industries adopt the technology within their product development processes. There is a growing demand for designers to acquire and hone their design for AM (DfAM) intuition and generate innovative solutions with AM. Resources that promote DfAM intuition, however, historically default to physical or digitally non-immersive modalities. Immersive virtual reality (VR) naturally supports 3D spatial perception and reasoning, suggesting its intuitive role in evaluating geometrically complex designs and fostering DfAM intuition. However, the effects of immersion on DfAM evaluations are not well-established in the literature. This study contributes to this gap in the literature by examining DfAM evaluations for a variety of designs across modalities using varying degrees of immersion. Specifically, it observes the effects on the outcomes of the DfAM evaluation, the effort required of evaluators, and their engagement with the designs. Findings indicate that the outcomes from DfAM evaluations in immersive and non-immersive modalities are similar without statistically observable differences in the cognitive load experienced during the evaluations. Active engagement with the designs, however, is observed to be significantly different between immersive and non-immersive modalities. By contrast, passive engagement remains similar across the modalities. These findings have interesting implications on how organizations train designers in DfAM, as well as on the role of immersive modalities in design processes. Organizations can provide DfAM resources across different levels of immersion, enabling designers to customize how they acquire DfAM intuition and solve complex engineering problems.
more »
« less
Identifying the Effects of Immersion on Design for Additive Manufacturing Evaluation of Designs of Varying Manufacturability
Abstract The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2021267
- PAR ID:
- 10433474
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) processes present designers with unique capabilities while imposing several process limitations. Designers must leverage the capabilities of AM — through opportunistic design for AM (DfAM) — and accommodate AM limitations — through restrictive DfAM — to successfully employ AM in engineering design. These opportunistic and restrictive DfAM techniques starkly contrast the traditional, limitation-based design for manufacturing techniques — the current standard for design for manufacturing (DfM). Therefore, designers must transition from a restrictive DfM mindset towards a ‘dual’ design mindset — using opportunistic and restrictive DfAM concepts. Designers’ prior experience, especially with a partial set of DfM and DfAM techniques could inhibit their ability to transition towards a dual DfAM approach. On the other hand, experienced designers’ auxiliary skills (e.g., with computer-aided design) could help them successfully use DfAM in their solutions. Researchers have investigated the influence of prior experience on designers’ use of DfAM tools in design; however, a majority of this work focuses on early-stage ideation. Little research has studied the influence of prior experience on designers’ DfAM use in the later design stages, especially in formal DfAM educational interventions, and we aim to explore this research gap. From our results, we see that experienced designers report higher baseline self-efficacy with restrictive DfAM but not with opportunistic DfAM. We also see that experienced designers demonstrate a greater use of certain DfAM concepts (e.g., part and assembly complexity) in their designs. These findings suggest that introducing designers to opportunistic DfAM early could help develop a dual design mindset; however, having more engineering experience might be necessary for them to implement this knowledge into their designs.more » « less
-
Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) is a rapidly growing technology within the industry and education sectors. Despite this, there lacks a comprehensive tool to guide AM novices in evaluating the suitability of a given design for fabrication by the range of AM processes. Existing design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) evaluation tools tend to focus on only certain key process-dependent DfAM considerations. By contrast, the purpose of this research is to propose a tool that guides a user to comprehensively evaluate their chosen design and educates the user on an appropriate DfAM strategy. The tool incorporates both opportunistic and restrictive elements, integrates the seven major AM processes, outputs an evaluative score, and recommends processes and improvements for the input design. This paper presents a thorough framework for this evaluation tool and details the inclusion of features such as dual-DfAM consideration, process recommendations, and a weighting system for restrictive DfAM. The result is a detailed recommendation output that helps users to determine not only “Can you print your design?” but also “Should you print your design?” by combining several key research studies to build a comprehensive user design tool. This research also demonstrates the potential of the framework through a series of user-based studies, in which the opportunistic side of the tool was found to have significantly improved novice designers’ ability to evaluate designs. The preliminary framework presented in this paper establishes a foundation for future studies to refine the tool’s accuracy using more data and expert analysis.more » « less
-
The capabilities of additive manufacturing (AM) open up designers’ solution space and enable them to build designs previously impossible through traditional manufacturing. To leverage AM, designers must not only generate creative ideas, but also propagate these ideas without discarding them in the early design stages. This emphasis on selecting creative ideas is particularly important in design for AM (DfAM), as ideas perceived as infeasible through the traditional design for manufacturing lens could now be feasible with AM. Several studies have discussed the role of DfAM in encouraging creative idea generation; however, there is a need to understand concept selection in DfAM. In this paper, we investigated the effect of two variations in DfAM education: 1) restrictive DfAM and 2) dual DfAM (opportunistic and restrictive) on students’ concept selection process. Specifically, we compared the creativity of the concepts generated by the students to the creativity of the concepts selected by them. Further, we performed qualitative analyses to explore the rationale provided by the students in making these design decisions. From the results, we see that teams from both educational groups select ideas of greater usefulness; however, only teams from the restrictive DfAM group select ideas of higher uniqueness and overall creativity. Further, we see that introducing students to opportunistic DfAM increases their emphasis on the complexity of designs when evaluating and selecting them. These results highlight the need for DfAM education to encourage AM designers to not just generate but also select creative ideas.more » « less
An official website of the United States government

