Using modularity to manage the interactions of technical and industrial design

Design Management Journal, 2002 by Sanchez, Ron

Introduction

Modularity, a design approach familiar to most designers, is now becoming an integral part of mainstream strategic management thinking. Growing numbers of global product firms are now not only adopting modular product designs, but are also adopting new kinds of product strategies and implementing new development processes that are explicitly focused on achieving a range of competitive advantages through modular product designs (Sanchez, 1999). As the experiences of these firms show, the systematic, strategic use of modularity concepts can significantly accelerate the product development process, increase the range of product variations a company can bring to market, enable more-rapid technological upgrading of products, and reduce costs of development and production (Sanchez and Collins, 2001; Sanchez, forthcoming).

As more companies around the world adopt modularity concepts in managing the technical development of new products, however, there is a growing need to develop approaches to integrating modular technical design and industrial design processes. This paper identifies some new priorities for industrial design in supporting modular product strategies and development processes, and describes some resulting key interactions of modular product strategies and the industrial design process. This paper also draws on a recent product design and development collaboration between Philips Design, in Hong Kong, and Philips Garment Care (PGC), in Singapore, to illustrate these new priorities and interactions.

Our discussion is organized in the following way. We first define the foundational concepts of product architectures and modularity and then summarize the main features of modular approaches to product development. We consider the new kinds of product strategy objectives being pursued through modular designs, as well as the new approaches to managing technical development processes now being used by companies with advanced modularity capabilities. With this overall perspective on the objectives and methods of modular design, we then identify some key strategic objectives for industrial design of modular products, and elaborate some important interactions between modular product development and industrial design processes. We then illustrate how these objectives and interactions were managed in the Philips Design-PGC development collaboration. We conclude by identifying some additional strategically important benefits for industrial designers that can result from collaborations with technical designers in modular development processes.

What are product architectures?

What makes them modular?

Designs of all products-whether hardware, software, "process" goods, or services-have an architecture. The architecture of a product design (Sanchez, 1995; Sanchez and Mahoney, 1996) refers to

1. The way the overall functionality of a product design is decomposed into functional components1

2. The way the functional components are intended to interact in the product-that is, the specifications of the component interfaces

These two defining properties of a product architecture are illustrated in Figure 1.

The way a product design is decomposed into functional components is usually directly observable in a physical product. However, only some of the interfaces in a product architecture may be visible and of direct concern to industrial designers. Figure 2 lists the six kinds of interfaces that must be defined and managed in a product architecture. Industrial designers are usually primarily concerned with defining the spatial interfaces of components in a product architecture-in effect, the space a component will occupy in a product design-and with the user interfaces that define how a user will interact with a product (which usually includes interactions of users with certain components, as well). Technical designers, on the other hand, are commonly concerned with defining the attachment, transfer, control and communication, and environmental interfaces for components in a product architecture. Of course, alternative approaches used by technical designers to defining these more technical interfaces may have significant implications for the spatial and user interfaces in a product design, and thus may also be of concern to industrial designers. Similarly, the concerns of industrial designers for the form and user friendliness of a product design are also likely to have implications for feasible approaches to specifying technical interfaces.

A modular product architecture is one that has been designed to allow the "mixing and matching" of different "plug-and-play" component variations in the overall product design to configure product variations. This configurability of an overall product design is achieved by specifying component interfaces that allow the substitution of component variations into the product design, without having to change the designs of other components in the product architecture. Perhaps the most familiar example of a modular product architecture is the desktop computer, in which a range of variations in microprocessors, memory cards, hard disks, monitors, keyboards, and other components can be freely combined to configure a nearly unlimited number of product variations. Growing numbers of firms are now using modular architectures to create highly configurable product designs (sometimes referred to as platforms) in product markets as diverse as automobiles, personal care products, financial services, food, software, industrial and consumer electronics, bicycles, home appliances, and professional services (Sanchez, 1999).