Research and application of visual thinking in design for manufacture

Product design is characterized as its creativity in the whole process of developing. A robust product scheme should bring all the important competitive advantage including some image aspects such as cooperation culture and other social aspects. Therefore, a synthesis method integrating with visual thinking factors should be introduced to overcome this problem in Design for Manufacture. In fact, the visual thinking factors can be regarded as the high level representation of expressing the form of artifact, just like we often use metaphor and imagery to describe something. Using the viewpoint of visual thinking within a product development project, some external elements can be added to and merged in a marked constraint for Design for Manufacture efficiently. By means of this method, this paper shows that Design for Manufacture can achieve its creativity at least in two aspects. The first one is helpful to form morphological character of product in manufacturing and this can emphasize product family and platform. The second one is to introduce social and culture factors so that product is adapt to subdivision market and interesting with its unique style.