A methodical approach to support ideation for additive manufacturing in design education

Additive manufacturing (AM) is a relatively new technology which opens the door to many new design possibilities for end-use products. However, many design engineers often are not familiar with the potentials of AM and therefore do not take advantage of them in the product development process. To overcome barriers in generation of new ideas caused by the limitations of conventional manufacturing processes particularly in the ideation stage, new design methods and tools are needed. Therefore, students as well as non-experts of AM have to be assisted to fully exploit the newly opened design potentials. This paper provides a methodical approach to enrich general design methods for ideation with AM knowledge for ensuring a user tailored support. Combinations between various methods to assist the ideation process are proposed based on the analysis of general ideation methods and existing AM-specific tools which consider potentials as well as limitations of AM. Subsequently, one of these combinations is utilized in an academic workshop and evaluated by the participants. Finally, the results of the evaluation are discussed.