Customer-led conceptual design system

This research work is aimed at carrying out a feasibility study for the design of a Customer-Led Design (CLD) system that will allow individuals or users with little or no technical know-how of engineering design but with an idea of what they want to bring the idea into reality through the customer driven-design system. Customer-Led design (CLD) is a customer co-design process of products and services which meet the needs of each individual customer/user with regard to certain product features VI and all operations are performed within a fixed solution space, characterized by stable but still flexible and responsive processes. Outstanding developments have been recorded in the Customer driven design systems in some areas such as shoes, kitchen and computers industries that have allowed customers to create their own product from the pre-defined catalogue of options made available by the manufacturers or designers. However, some customers might have an idea of a product which may not be in the pre-defined database of the manufacturer or designer and which the customer wants to have, especially mechanically oriented products and this is what has led to undertaking this research work. The activities that were carried out to achieve the objective of the project to date involved developing a hybrid (hierarchical and chain-type) classification system to group the products into classes and sub-classes using attributes such as applications, external and internal motions, shape, weight and material types etc.. Also, each of these classes was also grouped hierarchically linking one section of classification to another in a chain type that will eventually lead the customers to their intended product. Other aspects were the configuration of products which makes it possible to add and/or change functionalities of a core product by suggesting similar products if the requested product is not found, a coding system for mechanical designs and applying it to each product according to their position in the hierarchy, the use of a database to store and retrieve information about the products and the modification of the selected similar product to suit the user's/customer's desired product. While similar designs may have been implemented in some industries, this offers the customers more flexibility in designing their own products with varieties of products from different family of products which are not inherent in the other systems