How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

A prevalent and pervasive view of designing is that it can be modeled using variables and decisions made about what values should be taken by these variables. The activity of designing is carried out with the expectation that the designed artifact will operate in the natural world and the social world. These worlds impose constraints on the variables and their values; so, design could be described as a goal-oriented, constrained, decision- making activity. However, design distinguish- es itself from other similarly described activities not only by its domain but also by additional necessary features. Designing involves exploration, exploring what variables might be appropriate. The process of explo- ration involves both goal variables and deci- sion variables. In addition, designing involves learning: Part of the exploration activity is learning about emerging features as a design proceeds. Finally, design activity occurs within two contexts: the context within which the designer operates and the context produced by the developing design itself. The designer’s perception of what the context is affects the implication of the context on the design. The context shifts as the designer’s perceptions change. Design activity can be now characterized as a goal-oriented, con- strained, decision-making, exploration, and learning activity that operates within a con- text that depends on the designer’s percep- tion of the context.

Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design

A review of the wire arc additive manufacturing of metals: properties, defects and quality improvement

Effect of Selective Laser Melting (SLM) process parameters on microstructure and mechanical properties of 316L austenitic stainless steel

A new chapter in pharmaceutical manufacturing: 3D-printed drug products.

Additive manufacturing (AM) is poised to bring about a revolution in the way products are designed, manufactured, and distributed to end users. This technology has gained significant academic as well as industry interest due to its ability to create complex geometries with customizable material properties. AM has also inspired the development of the maker movement by democratizing design and manufacturing. Due to the rapid proliferation of a wide variety of technologies associated with AM, there is a lack of a comprehensive set of design principles, manufacturing guidelines, and standardization of best practices. These challenges are compounded by the fact that advancements in multiple technologies (for example materials processing, topology optimization) generate a "positive feedback loop" effect in advancing AM. In order to advance research interest and investment in AM technologies, some fundamental questions and trends about the dependencies existing in these avenues need highlighting. The goal of our review paper is to organize this body of knowledge surrounding AM, and present current barriers, findings, and future trends significantly to the researchers. We also discuss fundamental attributes of AM processes, evolution of the AM industry, and the affordances enabled by the emergence of AM in a variety of areas such as geometry processing, material design, and education. We conclude our paper by pointing out future directions such as the "print-it-all" paradigm, that have the potential to re-imagine current research and spawn completely new avenues for exploration. The fundamental attributes and challenges/barriers of Additive Manufacturing (AM).The evolution of research on AM with a focus on engineering capabilities.The affordances enabled by AM such as geometry, material and tools design.The developments in industry, intellectual property, and education-related aspects.The important future trends of AM technologies.

The status, challenges, and future of additive manufacturing in engineering

Product design is a highly involved, often ill-defined, complex and iterative process, and the needs and specifications of the required artifact get more refined only as the design process moves toward its goal. An effective computer support tool that helps the designer make better-informed decisions requires efficient knowledge representation schemes. In today's world, there is a virtual explosion in the amount of raw data available to the designer, and knowledge representation is critical in order to sift through this data and make sense of it. In addition, the need to stay competitive has shrunk product development time through the use of simultaneous and collaborative design processes, which depend on effective transfer of knowledge between teams. Finally, the awareness that decisions made early in the design process have a higher impact in terms of energy, cost, and sustainability, has resulted in the need to project knowledge typically required in the later stages of design to the earlier stages. Research in design rationale systems, product families, systems engineering, and ontology engineering has sought to capture knowledge from earlier product design decisions, from the breakdown of product functions and associated physical features, and from customer requirements and feedback reports. VR (Virtual reality) systems and multidisciplinary modeling have enabled the simulation of scenarios in the manufacture, assembly, and use of the product. This has helped capture vital knowledge from these stages of the product life and use it in design validation and testing. While there have been considerable and significant developments in knowledge capture and representation in product design, it is useful to sometimes review our position in the area, study the evolution of research in product design, and from past and current trends, try and foresee future developments. The goal of this paper is thus to review both our understanding of the field and the support tools that exist for the purpose, and identify the trends and possible directions research can evolve in the future.

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The evolution, challenges, and future of knowledge representation in product design systems

In recent years, 3D printing has gained significant attention from the maker community, academia, and industry to support low-cost and iterative prototyping of designs. Current unidirectional extrusion systems require printing sacrificial material to support printed features such as overhangs. Furthermore, integrating functions such as sensing and actuation into these parts requires additional steps and processes to create "functional enclosures", since design functionality cannot be easily embedded into prototype printing. All of these factors result in relatively high design iteration times. We present "RevoMaker", a self-contained 3D printer that creates direct out-of-the-printer functional prototypes, using less build material and with substantially less reliance on support structures. By modifying a standard low-cost FDM printer with a revolving cuboidal platform and printing partitioned geometries around cuboidal facets, we achieve a multidirectional additive prototyping process to reduce the print and support material use. Our optimization framework considers various orientations and sizes for the cuboidal base. The mechanical, electronic, and sensory components are preassembled on the flattened laser-cut facets and enclosed inside the cuboid when closed. We demonstrate RevoMaker directly printing a variety of customized and fully-functional product prototypes, such as computer mice and toys, thus illustrating the new affordances of 3D printing for functional product design.

/pdf/revomaker-enabling-multi-directional-and-functionally-1mk37eue29.pdf

RevoMaker: Enabling Multi-directional and Functionally-embedded 3D printing using a Rotational Cuboidal Platform

As an ancient paper craft originating from Japan, origami has been naturally embedded and contextualized in a variety of applications in the fields of mathematics, engineering, food packaging, and biological design. The computational and manufacturing capabilities today urge us to develop significantly new forms of folding as well as different materials for folding. In this paper, by allowing line cuts with crease patterns and creating folded hinges across basic structural units (BSU), typically not done in origami, we achieve a new multiprimitive folding framework such as using tetrahedral, cuboidal, prismatic, and pyramidal components, called “Kinetogami.” “Kinetogami” enables one to fold up closed-loop(s) polyhedral mechanisms (linkages) with multi-degree-of-freedom and self-deployable characteristics in a single build. This paper discusses a set of mathematical and design theories to enable design of 3D structures and mechanisms all folded from preplanned printed sheet materials. We present prototypical exploration of folding polyhedral mechanisms in a hierarchical manner as well as their transformations through reconfiguration that reorients the material and structure. The explicit 2D fabrication layout and construction rules are visually parameterized for geometric properties to ensure a continuous folding motion free of intersection. As a demonstration artifact, a multimaterial sheet is 3D printed with elastomeric flexure hinges connecting the rigid plastic facets. [DOI: 10.1115/1.4025506]

Kinetogami: A Reconfigurable, Combinatorial, and Printable Sheet Folding

Origami affords the creation of diverse 3D objects through explicit folding processes from 2D sheets of material. Originally as a paper craft from 17th century AD, origami designs reveal the rudimentary characteristics of sheet folding: it is lightweight, inexpensive, compact and combinatorial. In this paper, we present “HexaMorph”, a novel starfish-like hexapod robot designed for modularity, foldability and reconfigurability. Our folding scheme encompasses periodic foldable tetrahedral units, called “Basic Structural Units” (BSU), for constructing a family of closed-loop spatial mechanisms and robotic forms. The proposed hexapod robot is fabricated using single sheets of cardboard. The electronic and battery components for actuation are allowed to be preassembled on the flattened crease-cut pattern and enclosed inside when the tetrahedral modules are folded. The self-deploying characteristic and the mobility of the robot are investigated, and we discuss the motion planning and control strategies for its squirming locomotion. Our design and folding paradigm provides a novel approach for building reconfigurable robots using a range of lightweight foldable sheets.

Wei Gao

Papers

The status, challenges, and future of additive manufacturing in engineering

The evolution, challenges, and future of knowledge representation in product design systems

RevoMaker: Enabling Multi-directional and Functionally-embedded 3D printing using a Rotational Cuboidal Platform

Kinetogami: A Reconfigurable, Combinatorial, and Printable Sheet Folding

HexaMorph: A reconfigurable and foldable hexapod robot inspired by origami