Applications of TRIZ and Axiomatic Design: A Comparison to Deduce Best Practices in Industry☆

Abstract In the first decade of 2000s, several contributions have illustrated methods combining TRIZ and Axiomatic Design (AD). The strength of the connection was found in the complementary objectives AD and TRIZ pursue. AD is supposed to analyze the problem and structure it in the most convenient way, while TRIZ should solve the minimum number of design conflicts that are intrinsically present in a case study. Nevertheless, despite the promising match between AD and TRIZ, no conjoint application strategy has emerged as a reference, neither in academia, nor in industry. Conversely, the quantity has dropped of scientific papers contextually making reference to both methodologies. Some studies attempt to remark the methodological problems concerning the combination of AD and TRIZ. In a different perspective, the authors performed an application-oriented study, in order to point out the industrial domains for which the methodologies result the most suitable. The survey highlights that TRIZ is mostly employed for mass-market products, while AD is basically used to develop systems that industrial organizations make use of. The authors discuss the consequences of these findings, inferring how design can benefit from TRIZ and AD heuristics and the practical cases in which they are likely to be combined successfully

From the extraction of currently fulfilled requirements to value curves: a case-study in the field of harvesting machines for shell fruits and lessons learnt in engineering design

The market for agricultural machinery is characterized by products with a high degree of maturity in the product life cycle. Consequently, current improvements in new machinery are predominantly incremental and new projects basically use solutions that are already consolidated. This makes this domain appropriate for benchmarking existing systems and envisioning new value propositions. The present paper deals primarily with the former and uses the value curves as a means to structure the comparison among different families of technical systems; in particular, harvesting machines for shell fruits from the ground surface, e.g., chestnuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts, were investigated here. The process of building value curves requires the identification of currently fulfilled requirements. Despite the attention paid by engineering design research to requirements, a structured process is lacking to extract relevant information and create value curves or other representations useful for benchmarking. The present paper approaches this problem and presents how the authors have individuated relevant knowledge for characterizing different categories of harvesting machines. Namely, after an extensive search of the scientific literature and patents, a critical review of existing machines, aimed at individuating their functioning principles, architecture, and attitude in fulfilling specific design requirements, was performed. Then, existing machines were classified in 8 main categories, and their strengths and weaknesses were identified with reference to 11 competing factors. The consequent construction of value curves enabled the identification of possible points of intervention by hypothesizing possible future evolutions of such machinery, both in a structural and in a value-based perspective. Limitations about the repeatability of the followed approach and possible repercussions on design research are discussed

Editorial for the Special Issue "Requirements in Design Processes: Open Issues, Relevance and Implications"

Requirements play a key role in the design process by affecting analysis, synthesis and evaluation activities at different levels and in different ways [...

What surprised you? A questionnaire to map unexpectedness through FBS variables

The paper presents the analysis of an original online survey that aims at checking the factors triggering surprise in randomly chosen evaluators who were submitted a set of surprising products. The authors use the answers to check the capability of a situated FBS-based model to help catch the main factors triggering surprise in products, here seen as a mismatch between what is interpreted and previously conceived expectations. The survey questionnaire shows to be effective in grabbing surprising factors and the results demonstrate that the model allows a strong ex-post convergence in the investigation of surprising factors

Systematizing new value proposition through a TRIZ-based classification of functional features

AbstractIn recent years, several TRIZ practitioners have focused their attention on the application of TRIZ concepts for new business strategy definition. Among the others, the Blue Ocean Strategy has attracted the largest consensus. Nevertheless, this methodological approach proves to be very elegant to describe past business innovation successes, while it provides just general directions if a new profile of “values” is requested for a given product or service. The present paper analyzes with a TRIZ perspective 32 case studies from the BOS literature and shows that more prescriptive guidelines can be identified from these experiences