Evaluation of Designer Feedback Systems in Design for Manufacturability

The research study introduces a new designer feedback tool called Three Dimensional Integrated Feedback (3DIF) tool to convey manufacturability analysis results early in the conceptual design phase. The study evaluates and compares different modalities of manufacturability feedback given to de-sign engineers. The conceptual design stage is critical in deter-mining the feasibility of the whole production process. Providing designers with early suggestions and feedback about the manu-facturability of product designs will help to improve their design and save time and cost to manufacture. Feedback given to the design engineers could be in any form text, 2D markups, 3D data or verbal. Feedback can contain insufficient data or can be diffi-cult to interpret leading to frequent design iterations and in-crease in lead time. It is important that feedback should be able to convey necessary design information and should be in lan-guage understandable by design engineers. The modality of feed-back affects interpretability of the data presented. The study compares between no feedback, text-based feedback, 2D feed-back and 3D feedback modalities in the casting process of manu-facturing. The results expected from the study will help us to determine the appropriate modality of feedback that improves design performance of both expert and novice designers