Investigating designers’ preferred learning media for Design for Additive Manufacturing

Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM) has been identified as an enabler for the adoption of Additive Manufacturing (AM) as a mainstream manufacturing technology and efforts have been made by researchers to classify DfAM knowledge to enable designers to understand the knowledge required to design for AM. Having gained an understanding of the knowledge required for design for AM, and due to the dynamics in the evolution of AM technology, the next step is to uncover how designers learn and want to learn design for AM by investigating their preferred learning media. Studies have developed approaches by which design for AM knowledge can be acquired. However, either they have only focused on designers’ past learning media, the sample population was inadequate to provide a conclusion, or the investigation did not consider a variety of learning media that are useful in acquiring DfAM knowledge. Therefore, in this exploratory work, we investigated designers’ preferred learning media when learning design for AM. Furthermore, deploying an online survey questionnaire, we explored how factors such as years of experience, and the category of products designed, influence the choice of designers’ preferred learning media from 201 participants (AM and non-AM designers). The results show that designers have typically learned how to design for AM through experimentation and experience. However, interestingly, the results further revealed that regardless of the designers’ years of experience or the product category, in the future, designers expressed a preference to learn from experts and colleagues. The outcome of this work presents the first step towards developing an appropriate DfAM knowledge dissemination approach and has the potential to impact on how the industry and academia will structure DfAM knowledge dissemination and ensure that designers with varying levels of experience can successfully learn to design for AM using their most preferred learning media.