Open Design Pattern, Method, and its Self-organization Mechanism

As the consumer individualization is becoming stronger and the customer demand is changing more frequently, the traditional manufacture-active design pattern cannot meet the demands of the present age. It is widely acknowledged by experts that the individualization can be really realized if the consumer could participate in the product design process. At present, the consumer participation in product design process through Internet is quite prevalent, but the design methodology and theoretical foundation have never been concerned by previous studies. This paper proposes the concept of Open Design and then investigates related design pattern, method and self-organization mechanism to enable efficient implementation of consumer participation. Aiming at the increasingly complexity and variety with random consumer participation, a reference framework of Internet Open Design which based on social network is established to realize self-organization. Meanwhile, a dynamic function model tool and a knowledge fusion method are proposed to enable efficient and effective consumer participation online. The effectiveness of proposed model, theory and method are validated by simulation. This research on the Internet Open Design Pattern, Method and its Self-organization Mechanism extends the current product design methodology.