Collaborative products are created when physical components from two or more products are temporarily recombined to form another product capable of performing entirely new tasks. The method for designing collaborative products is useful in developing products with reduced cost, weight, and size. These reductions are valued in the developing world because collaborative products have a favorable task-per-cost ratio. In this paper, a method for designing collaborative products is introduced. The method identifies a set of products capable of being recombined into a collaborative product. These products are then designed to allow for this recombination. Three examples are provided to illustrate the method. These examples show that a collaborative block plane, apple peeler, and brick press, each created from a set of products, can increase the task-per-cost ratio of these products by 42%, 20%, and 30%, respectively. The author concludes that the method introduced herein provides a new and useful tool to design collaborative products and to engineer products that are valued in the developing world.

Collaborative products are created by combining components from two or more products to result in a new product that performs previously unattainable tasks. The resulting reduction in cost, weight, and size of a set of products needed to perform a set of functions makes collaborative products useful in the developing world. In this thesis, multiobjective optimization is used to design a set of products for optimal individual and collaborative performance. This is introduced through a nine step method which simultaneously optimizes multiple products both individually and collaboratively. The method searches through multiple complex design spaces while dealing with various trade-offs between products in order to optimize their collaborative performance. An example is provided to illustrate this method and demonstrate its usefulness in designing collaborative products for both the developed and developing world. We conclude that the presented method is a novel, useful approach for designing collaborative products while balancing the inherent trade-offs between the performance of collaborative products and the product sets used to create them.