Difficulties in Transformable Design and its implications

Abstract

The design of transformable products is difficult in comparison to the development of static products. This is due to the interdependency of various elements involved, developing working principle and proper mechanism and multi-functional requirements, before, during and after transformation. For example, the fundamental problems in the design of transformable products is that designers often have little experience and skills in transformable design process. As a consequence, the design concept for transformable products often being developed without much thought given to design concepts and engineering detail. This study aims to explore difficulties encountered by future designers in designing transformable products and present the causes of such difficulties to infer an effective transformable design process. Five students who major in industrial design have participated in this research . Participants were assigned a task to design a transformable flower lamp. The purpose of the task was to show blossom of the flower while it turns on the power. Moreover, participants were asked to design the structure of transformable flower in order to explain how the phenomenon of transformation works. During the design task, participants were facilitated to use a wide range of tools and methods as per their desires. In the meantime, they were interviewed and their task practices were video recorded. From verbal descriptions, several statements were analyzed that indicate difficulties in a direct and indirect sense regarding the design process. Such difficulties were categorized to identify its causes. The behavioral process in the task was analyzed to understand what (activity) was occurred when (time), and why (objective of activity). In the activity analysis, difficulties were matched with activity units to improve the transformable design process. The results suggest that the main difficulties in transformable design emerge due to the complex structure of transformable design which include design elements as well as engineering design elements. Though, typical product design need to consider both fields of industrial design and engineering design, but the overlapped area between them of transformable design is larger than the ordinary designs . Due to lack of knowledge required in the design of working principle for transformable design, the difficulties of additional systems’ applications and movement prediction generate the main difficulties in the design of transformable products. Besides this, the mediation between other design properties, such as appearance, movement, function, and use also generate difficulties. The reason is the usage of material space for each property, because of the interdependency among such properties. Furthermore, the interdependency causes the requirement for consideration of properties in various phases of transformation.