Stages in Product Lifecycle: Trans-disciplinary Design Context

This paper presents a stage based framework for analyzing transdisciplinary design processes in engineering product design and manufacturing. The framework provides a stage-wise, product lifecycle centric frame of reference for comparing design processes in industries from different industrial sectors involving multi-disciplinary stakeholders. The framework is based on extensive literature analysis in the domain of design theory and methodology, as well as from models in product life cycle management. The paper also reports insights on application of the framework for design processes analysis of 23 industries based on the mapping of their individual design processes to the developed framework.