PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CASE: FROM CONCEPT TO MANUFACTURE OF THREE COMPONENTS OF OILON’S BURNER.

Abstract

The position of the designer in a product development is often placed at the beginning of the process when the first ideas have to be created and then shaped to achieve a major concept. In fact the designer works closely to the development team, as this thesis shows, and must be able to follow the product design until the product is ready for the manufacture. The company have commissioned this work while developing a new series of burners. In this project the design is an important element between the improvements of the products that Oilon has settled as objectives. The thesis is considering only a part of a major design project where the designer is involved. The designer in this work wanted to give the reader a picture of designing a product in a company environment, selecting three elements of the major project. In the thesis, the process of developing three main concepts is described in detail; the use of external sources helped the designer to improve his methods to search ideas and elaborate them. The designer worked in a team during the entire product’s development process where the team was the R&D group of the company. This gave the possibility to analyse the results and improve them in a very short time. The constant need to report about the developments achieved and the changes, while making the thesis, makes the designer constantly analyze the method used. In the development phases, the timetable and different backgrounds of the R&D group make the design process difficult but in this thesis the process adopted gives satisfactory results.