Development of innovative principles to perform given functions

The mechanical design process requires, as fundamental aim, to realize the technical solution for the functions that the product must perform as specify by the market. The process requires the ability to conceive the solution by means of the elaboration of information furnished. For this, the principal role of a designer is to make decisions on the basis of scientific criteria and technical experience. Decisions are governed by multiple measures of merit and involve the treatment of multileveled information. The information required to arrive at a decision comes from different sources, disciplines and, in many cases, they may not be available. One of the most important questions about the design process regards the definition of the tools able to support the search and the management of the information. These tools must be able to come up to expectations of the designer in terms of knowledge, examples and methods. In this environment, an important problem for the designer is, for example, how to identify and choose the technical principles among the ones that perform the functions. While the choice depends from the requirements of the specific product in design, the identification is a process that could be expanded in diverse directions, without limitations. The identification process, in fact, could be useful to inspire the creativity of the designer, providing a wide spectre of technical principles as examples. Many examples are directly obtained from both the experience and the know-how of the designer, but many others could be derived from different sources. The development of a procedure to face this stage together with its implementation in a computer tool is an interesting effort to support the designer work. This paper reports the activities in progress to achieve the definition of a general method that the designer could follow to satisfy the previous explained goals. The research opened at the Mechanical Department at Politecnico di Milano is focused on the creation of tools, as well as, design procedures that can be used during the decisional process [1-2].