A matrix approach to the customer-oriented product design

A customer-oriented product designer must rely on many types of information, including customer-product requirements and design developments in the related fields. Concurrent engineering applications in product design problems will help designers to systematically consider relevant design information and make the most effective use of the time they devoted to the design process. Even though many new principles and approaches have been introduced to help designers to identify the relationship between customer requirements and design characteristics and solve complex design problems, they seldom focus on the generation of feasible design alternatives. This drawback greatly affects customer-oriented product design development. This research introduces a matrix approach that can efficiently generate feasible design alternatives for a specific set of customer requirements. The procedures developed for this matrix approach is based on a congruent matrix multiplication operator, component design strategy, and relational database system. A sport shoe design is used as an example to help explain the development of these procedures. The results indicate that the matrix approach will assist designers in linking customer requirements with products during design development and even enhance the efficiency of concurrent engineering.