5. Open Product Design for Social Manufacturing

In this chapter, open product design is introduced as a kind of service-driven product design methodology which meets closely with the needs of social manufacturing paradigm. It is quite different from traditional product design approach in many aspects, including idea creations, designers operations, design activities, design workflow, design result evaluations, etc. In order to understand the basis of this novel product design methodology, we first discuss the designer role changing in social manufacturing and qualitatively demonstrate how to self-organize the tremendous socialized designers into designer communities to carry out design tasks. And then, basic architecture and operation mode of crowdsourcing driven open product design services are introduced to provide a full view of this design mode. To support the implementation of open product design mode, key enabled technologies and their corresponding computing methods are illustrated, which are customer requirements analysis, design community shaping and analyzing, and design evaluation. All these researches gain a deeper understanding of open product design and provide initial theoretical support for its further development and applications.