Abstract:

In this paper, the authors investigate the design innovation process of industrial products when it concerns traditional industrial products blocked into formal and/or functional archetypes.

The discussion arose form the results of an educational activity held in the Product Design Development Course at the Design School of Politecnico di Milano, Italy, during the first year of Mater Degree in Design & Engineering, in 2014/15.

The general aim of the Course is to train student’s skills in developing innovative products based on a design driven innovation approach. In particular, three levers of innovation are described and used: form, mode of use and technology, according to the concept of "Innovation Pyramid" described by Lucia Rampino in the article “The innovation pyramid: A categorization of the innovation phenomenon in the product-design field. International Journal of Design, 5(1), 3-16) (2011)”.

The students are asked to perform three exercises to understand and use the power of these three levers. In the first exercise, they develop skills related to form giving; in the second, they analyze the mode of use of a product and redesign it with concern to this aspect. In the third exercise, they develop the concept of a new product that must be innovative from one or more points of view (form, use and technology). In addition, students must develop a product form the point of view of manufacturability.

In this paper, the authors discuss the third exercise. The topic of this year Course was to design a “pasta machine” which is a very typical Italian manual machine to make any kind of fresh pasta, which comes from an extruding process of flat layers. The design brief had some mandatory requirements: the new machine should be for home use, not professional; the machine should work with the same kind of mechanism to extrude pasta (based on two rollers); it should be manual; accessories such as cutter rollers were optional. Other than that, the brief was open to any kind on innovation.

The interesting aspect of this work is that the Pasta machine is a very traditional product that has not evolved very much since its industrial development in the first decades of last century. Therefore, students had the chance to outdo a very consolidated archetype. From the observation of this activity, authors realized how much the lever of innovation based on the “mode of use” was predominant, while the overview on the final development of the product came also from the technical manufacturing choices, resulted in very innovative forms and, finally, language of the products.

Examples of new pasta machine will be describe together with the investigation of the design process that lead to outdo the product archetypes. The success of the educational experience was proved by the feedback received by one of the Italian company leader in this sector.

Keywords:

Archetype, mode of use, design driven innovation, form generation, manufacturability.