Methodology for innovative design

Abstract

An innovative design activity has to start with the deployment of all the functionalities we want for the new product, the explicit and the implicit ones. It is during the first part of the design process. when we transform the functionalities in order to choose structures, before the detail design, that we can introduce innovation.

We propose for that a review of different physical principles, and for each of them, to search the solutions able to give an answer for each function. Different structures are attached to the different solutions. A global choice between the local solution keeps the coherence of the possible solutions, in which we found the traditional answer, but also innovative results.

Of course we must aid the designer in order to review the different physical principles. We propose for that a knowledge database to store the association functions — physical principles — solutions and a methodology to fill and to use this database.