Education and implementation of an approach for new product design: An industry-university collaboration

This paper discusses the education and implementation of a formal product design process in Praxair, Inc. a Fortune 500 company, and identifies the changing educational needs of the engineering designer. There is a growing need to be able to implement formal product design processes effectively and efficiently in industry, rather than using a collection of scattered and ad hoc design tools. This need stems from the ever-increasing global pressures to reduce costs, improve products, and provide faster delivery. Embracing and implementing a formal product design process allows a company to approach product design more from a holistic standpoint, where information, preferences, and tradeoffs, can be quickly processed resulting in better and quicker design decisions throughout the design process. In this paper, we share our experiences and lessons learned with both the teaching of such a design process and the implementation of the process in a corporate environment. This paper is intended to be an educational resource and to provide design process researchers continued motivation for their work.