Evaluating the Effectiveness of Heuristic Cards With Varying Example Specificity in Design for Additive Manufacturing Education

Abstract Additive manufacturing (AM) is an emerging technology capable of producing intricate designs. Despite the advantages that AM affords, such as geometric complexity and material reduction, designers often leverage simple geometries and standard components instead. These design decisions lead to inefficient designs that do not leverage the capabilities of AM. There is a need to help designers improve their designs so they can be better suited for AM. This work explores ways to support DfAM thinking using specific and abstract DfAM exemplars. To understand the relevancy of the content needed to improve designs for AM, an experiment was conducted where students were tasked with a design challenge where they were told that the designs would theoretically be manufactured using AM. Throughout the design challenge, the students received design considerations for AM in the form of paper cards that contained visual examples that were either abstract or product-specific. The students evaluated their own designs, while expert raters were tasked with determining if the visual example relevancy influenced the manufacturability of the designs. This work found that the design considerations regarding “Mass Customization” and “Feature Size” significantly varied in the designs when the students were exposed to the varying intervention content material.