Design for Lifecycle-Flexibility: Design objectives that enhance coping with uncertainties throughout product lifecycles

Modern product lifecycles are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty. In order to cope with critical lifecycle-uncertainties, specific flexibility requirements comprising product functions and company capabilities are necessary. However, only an appropriate product design that enhances fulfilling these requirements enables coping with uncertainties and resulting changes throughout product lifecycles effectively, efficiently and proactively. Therefore, this paper investigates how product design and flexibility requirements can be systematically linked. Having identified 27 relevant DFX guidelines, a literature review resulted in the collection of around 1700 related design principles from 93 sources. Summarized to 650 final principles, they were further clustered into 24 design objectives according to their main purposes. Statements about the importance of each design principle to enhance coping with lifecycle-uncertainties are based on the quantity of related DFX guidelines. In order to realize an appropriate lifecycle-flexibility, a possible approach to define relevant product functions and company capabilities following the double diamond design process is introduced. In the final step, the employment of a domain mapping matrix supports the selection of appropriate design objectives aiming to enhance fulfilling the defined flexibility requirements.