1. What do you understand from this case? How this case is relevant with product design?

Airbus is the world's largest passenger airliner. Airbus studies started in 1988 and the project
was announced in 1990 to challenge the dominance of the Boeing 747 in the long haul market.
The then-designated A3XX project was presented in 1994; Airbus launched the €9.5  billion
($10.7 billion) A380 programme on 19 December 2000. The first prototype was unveiled
in Toulouse on 18 January 2005, with its first flight on 27 April 2005. Difficulties in electrical
wiring caused a two-year delay and the development cost ballooned to €18 billion. It obtained
its type certificate from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the US Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) on 12 December 2006.
It was first delivered to Singapore Airlines on 15 October 2007 and entered service on 25
October. Production peaked at 30 per year in 2012 and 2014. However, Airbus concedes that its
$25 billion investment for the aircraft cannot be recouped. On 14 February 2019,
after Emirates reduced its last orders in favor of the A350 and the A330neo, Airbus announced
that A380 production would end by 2021.
From this review of the Airbus A360 case, we can see that product design is a must for any type
of product. All kinds of information must be collected while creating the design. Otherwise it will
not be effective. To get to a final design of a product or service, the design activity must pass
through several key stages. These form an approximate sequence, although in practice
designers will often recycle or backtrack through the stages. We will describe them in the order
in which they usually occur, as shown in bellow:

Concept Concept Preliminary

Generation Screening Design

Prototyping and
Evaluation and Final design
Improvement

Difficulties

Figure: The stages of product/service design

Good design makes good business sense because it translates customer needs into the shape
and form of the product or service and so enhances profitability. Design includes:

Concept Concept Preliminary

Generation Screening Design

Prototyping and
Evaluation and Final design
Improvement
 Figure: The stages of product/service design

Concept generation: The ideas for new product or service concepts can come from sources
outside the organization, such as customers or competitors, and from sources within the
organization, such as staff (for example, from sales staff and front-of-house staff ) or from the
R&D department. Marketing, the function generally responsible for identifying new product or
service opportunities may use many market research tools for gathering data from customers in
a formal and structured way, including questionnaires and interviews. These techniques,
however, usually tend to be structured in such a way as only to test out ideas or check products
or services against predetermined criteria. Listening to the customer, in a less structured way, is
sometimes seen as a better means of generating new ideas. In the case of the Airbus 360,
market research was needed, so product design could have been done in a better way. Notable
sources of information for the design of Airbus A360 include:

 Ideas from customers

 Listening to customers
 Ideas from competitor activity
 Ideas from staff
 Ideas from research and development.

Concept screening: Not all concepts which are generated will necessarily be capable of further
development into products and services. Designers need to be selective as to which concepts
they progress to the next design stage. The purpose of the concept-screening stage is to take the
flow of concepts and evaluate them. Evaluation in design means assessing the worth or value of
each design option, so that a choice can be made between them. This involves assessing each
con-cept or option against a number of design criteria. While the criteria used in any particular
design exercise will depend on the nature and circumstances of the exercise, it is useful to think
in terms of three broad categories of design criteria:

● The feasibility of the design option – can we do it?

– Do we have the skills (quality of resources)?

– Do we have the organizational capacity (quantity of resources)?

– Do we have the financial resources to cope with this option?

● The acceptability of the design option – do we want to do it

– Does the option satisfy the performance criteria which the design is trying to achieve?

(These will differ for different designs.)

 – Will our customers want it?

– Does the option give a satisfactory financial return?

● The vulnerability of each design option – do we want to take the risk? That is,

– Do we understand the full consequences of adopting the option?

– Being pessimistic, what could go wrong if we adopt the option? What would be the
con- sequences of everything going wrong? (This is called the ‘downside risk’ of an
option.)

Preliminary design: Having generated an acceptable, feasible and viable product or service
concept the next stage is to create a preliminary design. The objective of this stage is to have a
first attempt at both specifying the component products and services in the package, and defining
the processes to create the package. In this case, what will be the parts of the plan? Where to
buy? How much will it cost? Etc. The product had to be designed with the correct answers to
these questions.

Design evaluation and improvement: The purpose of this stage in the design activity is to take the
preliminary design and see if it can be improved before the product or service is tested in the
market. There are a number of techniques that can be employed at this stage to evaluate and
improve the preliminary design. Here we treat three which have proved particularly useful:

● Quality function deployment (QFD)

● Value engineering (VE)

● Taguchi methods.