Design and Evaluation of Designer Feedback System in Design for Manufacturability

The aim of the study is to develop and evaluate a prototype designer feedback tool to give manufacturability feedback information to design engineers early at the conceptual design stage. Providing design engineers early manufacturability information on their designs helps them to improve manufacturing quality of their designs thus reducing the overall cost and lead time to manufacture. The Three Dimensional Integrated Feedback (3DIF) system is designed to be a manufacturing visualization feedback tool that is generalizable, automated, usable, inexpensive and portable. Feedback given to design engineers can be in various modalities, including verbal, text, 2D drawings, or 3D. Information abstraction and modality significantly affect its interpretation, so it is important that feedback given to the design engineers should be in the language understandable to them and is able to convey necessary information with minimal interpretation. An experiment has been designed to evaluate performance and workload differences between expert and novice design engineers when they conduct design tasks in feedback modalities. The preliminary results from the study show that providing feedback in 3D improves the manufacturing quality of the end design with lower overall cognitive workload.