Creativity-based design innovation environment in support of robust product development

In today’s highly demanding customers and aggressive competitors, product development is getting more complex and needs to innovate continuously. On the other hand common direction towards cost savings and shortening of design cycle forces to make the product design process highly efficient at high level of performance. Accordingly, this paper provides a new creative design tool to support robust product development by taking advantage of a creativity-based design process to achieve the goals of innovative product design. It describes a pilot prototype of software system used for computer-aided product development which has been developed based on the characteristics of the product design process, integrating the creative thinking methods, information technologies and computer application technologies (CAD system, LabVIEW, Game Technology, etc.). This new design environment leads to a flexible working flow of designing a product hand in hand with searching a product library that is arranged by geometric properties and allows designers, engineers and other professionals to collaborate with each other on the same platform in the product development process.