Enhancing intra-cognitive communication in product design with color-coded CAD models: A visualization approach

Empirical investigation in the European aerospace industry has shown major drawbacks in the way design teams share information about the value contribution of a solution during early design stages. Across functions and organizations, design teams collaborate mainly using the contractual requirements as a basis, lacking of recording and communicating the contextual knowledge and the overall intent of product and service development projects. The paper proposes an approach that uses color-coded 3D CAD models for intra-cognitive communication of such value-related information to enhance the decision-making process in design. The paper first introduces the concept of product service systems and the benefits provided by visualization, afterwards it describes how value visualization can be implemented in a CAD 3D environment. A case study derived from the aerospace industry is presented to provide an example of application of the approach in a real industrial environment.