Frugal Design Approach

The engineering of frugal products depends significantly on their design. This is because, the design stage provides many opportunities to correct flaws in the product at this initial conceptual level. Since frugality depends on strict restraints on resource consumption, the design process affords opportunities to iron out as many “heavy-spots” as possible to facilitate subsequent engineering of the frugal product. Hence the design process is crucial for frugal products and this chapter outlines a new design approach for infusing rigor in the engineering of such products. The design principles outlined in this chapter relate to products that have been developed to date through traditional engineering and hence are applicable to any exercise in new product development or frugalization of existing devices. Therefore, the approach suggested in this chapter will be applicable to the advanced frugal innovations covered in chapter 4. The astute reader might be wondering about the plausibility of this statement because chapter 4 has covered a wide range of AFIs including point of care devices and others.