Functional reverse design for secondary innovation
by Dunbing Tang; Yuyun Kang; Renmiao Zhu
International Journal of Product Lifecycle Management (IJPLM), Vol. 5, No. 2/3/4, 2011

Abstract: Reverse engineering has been a common means to glean the design experience and knowledge attached to existing products, which can enable efficient product redesign. Traditionally reverse engineers focus on geometric reverse modelling which cannot capture the designer's intention and may cause problems of intellectual property. As the most important creative design work is done at the conceptual design stage, it is essential for redesign of an existing artefact to understand its functional structure in order to consider the intention of the original design. In this research, it is proposed that the current reverse engineering shall be extended to the functional modelling phase, and a functional reverse design method for secondary innovation is presented to overcome the shortcoming of geometric reverse engineering. The methodology of functional reverse design is conducted through two sequential steps: functional reverse engineering and functional reengineering. Functional reverse engineering is to reproduce the original function structure of the existing product through structure-to-function mapping, and functional reengineering is to improve or update the mapped original function model for secondary innovation. A case study is given to illustrate the proposed functional reverse design method.

Online publication date: Thu, 26-Mar-2015

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