Designers and engineers can find a wealth of information on Wikipedia to help with their product design and innovation efforts. Complementary to innovation.world, these 8 Wikipedia articles provide comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date information on a wide range of skills and background info needed for product design and innovation.
Complementary to this site, we recommend these interesting readings related to some of the early stages of the phase-gate model of Product Design:
Wikipedia Articles for Product Design
Product Planned Obsolescence: see Planned Obsolescence., is one of our preferred articles because involving technics, marketing, and sales logic, competition, and value analyses … all that is required for a complete approach to Product Design.
The Kano model: proposed by Prof Noriaki Kano, his model classifies customer quality expectations into 5 categories. Very useful when it comes to deciding on specs and later taking cost-cutting decisions in value analyses. English text should be viewed here, but other language versions may be more complete in this particular case.
Form Follows Function: one of our preferred aspects in product design (“FFF”, not to be confused in product design with “Fit Form & Function analysis). See all our FFF-related articles. But for the history of FFF, related to architecture, refer to their article here Form Follows Function.
Extensive acronyms List: likely the most complete, industry-wide acronym list. For our dedicated sector, see our Product Design Acronyms list. Both have to be used with care in order to avoid the funny (when done by others!) acronym trap.
Life-Cycle Assessment: a recently developed methodology and evaluation to assess product or process impact on the environment. Standardization so as to become mandatory is on the way for ecological reasons.
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) is a KPI must for quality design and V&V. So read on MTBF.
The Fire Triangle should be known to any design engineer, not only dealing with fire, HSE aspects, or oxygen. Read more here.
The AIDA model, used in Marketing is the oldest model for advertising and selling and stands for the 4 following steps: Attention (or Awareness) Interest Desire Action. Read more here.
A review of most bioplastics, their core material, related issues, and challenges. A must-know as these are replacing more and more traditional plastics used throughout the consumer market on billions of products per year. Read more here.
Suggest your Wikipedia articles related to design or innovation on the right