Design for Control

Currently, a large series of helpful guidelines for the design of products in the more concrete stages of design and product development were generated and published under the notion design for X, such as Design for Manufacture and Assembly (DFMA), Design to Cost (DtC), and Design for Sustainability (DfS). Until now, little attention has been given to design guidelines aiming to supporting designers in creating products that enable and ease control – no special attention has been given to Design for Control (DfC) guidelines. Some researchers have started to investigate DfC, but until now, the more conceptual stages of design were not the focus of their research. Additionally, recent research in the direction of Design for Diagnosis (DfD) has been initiated, which shares some common elements with DfC. In this paper, a first attempt is made to formulate hypotheses for how mechanical and electrical products can be designed in order to enable and to ease effective and efficient control.