Development of a redesign process based on reverse engineering and patent circumvention

In recent years, designing innovative products has been the focal key to success in the global market. Designers, whether practitioners or engineering students, encounter several problems to develop feasible, desirable, and viable products in the markets. Many designers turn to existing products to extract ideas by using Reverse Engineering or alternatively by harnessing the power of patents and the capability of Patent Circumvention tools. However, most of the current efforts consist only of applying these methods separately without exploring their complementarity potential. Thus, no combined method has been developed yet. This work addresses this gap by proposing an integrated design process that leverage on the synergy effect of Reverse Engineering and Patent Circumvention. The proposed process is deployed following four phases: Product identification, problem analysis, redesign solution and test and implementation. The strengths of this process lies on the combined generation of proven ideas from existing product and innovative ideas from patent without infringing them. To understand, experiment, and weigh up the relevance of the process, its application for the development of a new flushing mechanism subsystem is illustrated as a case study. This paper is intended to empower designers with a new redesign process of products that can also be used in education setting.