Talk:Inkjet Printer Design Report2 Spring 2007

From DDL Wiki

We received your report, and you have done some interesting preliminary work, but much remains to do. Your last two design concepts are good areas to explore, but your sketches do not provide enough detail to assess feasibility, functionality is still quite vague, and the demonstration of market need is not strong. You need to do some preliminary analysis and more research to assess, but we need you to complete this quickly and move quickly into detailed design to stay on schedule.

Your market research results are somewhat unexpected - Is it really true that the three most common complaints were size, speed, and media latitude, or was the media latitude your idea? I would be surprised if users mentioned this without prompting. It’s okay if you want to pursue this concept, but you need legitimate evidence that there is a market for it.

• The drop down printer concept is interesting. Our primary concern is safety, and our secondary concerns are size and cost. The functionality is also unclear – we assume the printer would only be able to print on flat objects (except for the “bottle mode” you mention), but how would objects of different shapes be located? Also, will standard ink formulas print effectively to the range of objects you propose? It’s not clear what the market for this device would be. There are many details to work out with this concept, and it is difficult to assess feasibility at this point. Why did you choose a pneumatic system?
• The printer hanger concept is interesting, but would it really save any more space than simply putting a vertical printer next to the tower?
• The modularity concept is interesting, although we already use quite a bit of modular design in planning out our current product families. If you have more specific concepts about which components should be made modular and how, we would be interested to see.
• The universal cartridge holder is quite interesting indeed – this would make a big impact on the printer market, since the business model currently has companies making their money off of ink cartridges, not off of printer sales. This is particularly challenging because each cartridge has not only a different overall shape, but also in electrical contact points, controller logic, and position of print droplets. The software and driver issues could be handled by an electrical engineering team if you could figure out how to make all of the mechanical components (including placement of contacts and droplet location) to be universal. Have you done a survey of existing cartridges to assess feasibility?
• The thicker media printing idea is interesting. Since direct print-to-CD products exist, we would need to see other marketable applications to assess interest, and there are significant challenges with how to design rollers that can handle a variety of media while still providing the appropriate degree of friction force needed to guide said media and position it accurately. You may need to look into modular locating and clamping units that can be interchanged to hold different objects.

Your list of customer needs on your Pugh chart is rather sparse, possibly contributing to the narrow range of results, and you did not weight them. Your VOA is also not clear – is this an analysis of the existing design or of your proposed design?

We recommend that you undertake another round of concept generation where you go deeper into details of your concepts, and we recommend that you compliment this with added market research to find out what products already exist as well as what the market needs are – particularly if your interest is in increasing media latitude. Your last two concepts appear most promising. The universal cartridge holder could make significant impact in the industry – this would require detailed analysis of the geometry of existing cartridges including contact patterns and droplet patterns, and it would require ingenuity in adapting to this variety using adjustability and modularity. More research and more detailed concepts are needed to assess feasibility, but you need to move beyond this phase and quickly into detailed design. The thicker media printing idea is good, but you need to find out what is already in the market (cds, etc) and argue a clear need for a specific set of media on which users wish to print, and you need to work out details with how to locate and move the objects with precision.

We look forward to seeing your prototypes in the design review.