Comparing the Impacts of Design Principles for Additive Manufacturing on Student and Experienced Designers

Additive manufacturing (AM) continues to play an important role in product development. Often, AMis integrated into later stages of the design process for products during detailed design, manufacturing, and production. There is an opportunity to introduceAMduring early-stage design, which could inspire new business models and services in addition to re-thinking manufacturing for products and artefacts. The research objectives of this work are to first develop AM Design Principle Cards, which include a set of design principles for AM, and then demonstrate the impact of the AM design principles on designers' ideation performance. An ideation experiment was conducted to show the impact of the AMdesign principles on novelty and quality of ideation performance between students and experienced designers, as well as self-reported reactions and knowledge acquisition in AM. The research demonstrates that the AM Design Principle Cards can serve as a useful and meaningful design tool to support knowledge acquisition, creativity, and innovation with AM during early-stage design.