Appearance FMEA - a Method for Appearance Quality Evaluation of Early Design Concepts
Paper in proceeding, 2009

For consumer products, early design stages are often concerned with the product's industrial design, with primary focus on the consumer's product experience. At this stage, aspects such as manufacturability and robustness are often not thoroughly taken into account. Industrial design concepts not properly suited for manufacture, assembly and process variability can result in final products in which the appearance intent is not satisfactorily realized. This can have a negative impact on the customer's product quality perception. If such problems are discovered late in the product development process, late design changes and increased project costs may follow. The main difficulty in evaluating perceived quality aspects during industrial design is that the product is still under development. It is not mature enough to enable prediction of the prerequisites for achieving high manufacturing quality. In this paper, we suggest that concepts instead could be evaluated as far as the intrinsic tendency of the product appearance to support manufacturing variation and other noise factors. This is addressed through the concept of visual robustness: the ability of a product's visual appearance to stimulate the same product experience despite variety in its visual design properties. Here, a method is suggested based on the Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). The method follows a structured procedure for addressing appearance issues.

Author

Karin Nordvall

Chalmers, Product and Production Development, Product Development

Timo Kero

Chalmers, Product and Production Development, Product Development

Rikard Söderberg

Chalmers, Product and Production Development, Product Development

2009 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, DETC2009; San Diego, CA; United States; 30 August 2009 through 2 September 2009

Vol. 8 PART A 217-225
978-0-7918-3856-3 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Other Mechanical Engineering

Other Engineering and Technologies not elsewhere specified

ISBN

978-0-7918-3856-3

More information

Created

10/6/2017