Develop a new sustainable business concept for Enviu in 2015 involving 3D printing technology

Develop a new sustainable business concept for Enviu in 2015 involving 3D printing technology

Korthals, M.

Verlinden, J.C. (mentor)
Kleinsmann, M. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovation Management

Strategic Product Design

2011-05-20

Enviu is a young foundation that scouts and develops WOW! projects. These WOW! Projects are sustainable projects that have the objective to become an independent businesses on the long term. This graudation project has the objective to develop a new WOW! Project concept for Enviu utilizing 3D printing. The advantages of 3D printing are combined with the requirements of Enviu which has led to multiple ideas for this WOW! project. There is chosen to proceed with the idea to utilize 3D printing for solving eyewear and distribution issues in developing countries. Eyewear is developed as a product that solves health issues of low vision. However, it has become more and more an image building product because the object is dominantly visible. Nonetheless, over 135 million people in the world lack of proper eyewear while they need eyewear to improve their vision. Three causes were identified when analysing the problem. First of all, many developing areas in the world lack knowledge on proper eyecare, hygiene and eye measurements. Too little specialists are present to help the inhabitants of those countries. Besides this, the largest eyewear distribution problems occur in rural areas dealing with low purchase power and far distant to cities. These isolated areas have often insufficient infrastructure which complicates the eyewear distribution towards these areas. By considering these challenges a product service system is model is created visualized in Figure 1. A product service system for in India is developed representing a ‘mobile optician’ addressing these seven steps, explained in Figure 2. Besides an eyewear model construction is designed in which the lenses and the frames are produced with 3D printers, presented in Figure 3. Providing this product and customize it during co-creation in the product service system will solve eyewear distribution issues utilizing 3D printers in rural areas of India.

3D printing
eyewear
product service system

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:670ddbe7-8891-43ec-9d56-a4b645be6d36

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2011 Korthals, M.