Coupling engineering knowledge with product design knowledge by the means of multiple view product model

Product design involves a multitude of actors who have complementary knowledge and responsibility about the product under development. Coupling together their views-points, particularly these of product designers and engineering designers in the upstream phases of the design, has the objectives to make the collaboration easier and to improve the product from both of their expertises. The Product/Process multi-view model is a collaborative tool which supports engineering designers during product development processes. It allows the structuring and tracing of relative knowledge of engineering designers on the product. We make the assumption that Product/Process multi-view model could also be used to create relationships with the product designer’s representation. The paper deals with this product model and illustrates the possible connection between engineering knowledge and product design knowledge. INTRODUCTION We asked a product designer to describe one of his products (shown in figure 1). He said it is a red plastic bag that can be carried like a backpack. It has an oriented shape which gives the feeling of being aerodynamic and having a sportive appearance. The engineering designer described the same product not as a mono color bag but rather a combination of several parts with several colors, materials and shapes. This simple example shows the different ways that a product can be considered from -on one handa product designer point of view and on the other hand an engineering designer point of view, due to their expertness, knowledge and professional vision. Product design involves a multitude of actors who have complementary responsibilities about the product under development. In this article we distinguish two types of experts. The engineering designers are in charge of the product and process compliance into the technical measurable performances. The product designers are responsible for the overall product perception and aesthetics and they deal rather with the subjective meanings and sometimes non-measurable properties of the product. For the sector of brand products – which is our interest in this articleone challenge is that the products should differ from the competitors and express their own brand identity, so the product designer needs to focus on the identity of products which may come from the style, manufacture, technology, etc. Therefore better sharing of experts’ knowledge between product designer and engineering designer results in better product design regarding to the brand requirements. Figure 1, Tennis bag designed by Dièdre Design