Enhancing Design Decisions in Material Selection

Volume 5 Issue 4 January - March 2018

Research Paper

Enhancing Design Decisions in Material Selection

Tom Page*, Gisli Thorsteinsson**

* Senior Lecturer, Loughborough Design School, United Kingdom.

** Professor, Department of Design and Craft Education, Iceland University of Education, Iceland.

Page,T., and Thorsteinsson, G. (2018). Enhancing Design Decisions in Material Selection. i-manager’s Journal on Material Science, 5(4), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.26634/jms.5.4.13968

Abstract

At present, designers usually carry the responsibility to select adequate materials for their designs, and without supportive expert knowledge in materials, there will be chances that wrong choices are made inevitably in material selection, which leads to product failures. The aim of this paper is to determine the enhancement of design decisions in the material selection process with the history of material application failures in order to find out what information should be provided for designers so that a well-informed decision can be made on the material selection. From the literature survey conducted, material selection should be considered early and in all stages of the design process so that designers can identify suitable range of materials earlier thus narrowing their choice of material when the design concept is developed. Designers should explore the opportunity to manipulate the intangible characteristics of materials to deliver the desired sensation or emotion to users. The history of material application failures were often not recorded or made available to designers, which explained why poor decision were made in material selection. In order to overcome this problem, a reference library of possible material application failures may be linked to an automated knowledge based material selection system which can include a pro-active warning mechanism that alerts the user when a failure history was discovered with the selected material.