APPLICATION OF ROBUST DESIGN TECHNIQUES TO CHINESE HUQIN MUSICAL INSTRUMENT DESIGN

摘要

This paper presents the results of teaching robust design techniques to industrial design students in the Chinese context. Year 3 students in a Bachelor of Engineering programme at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China studied robust design techniques over a one-semester course. As part of the course, the students worked in two groups to apply robust design techniques to traditional Chinese musical instruments: the jinghu and the erhu. The two groups took divergent approaches to the project. One group sought to follow traditional manufacturing processes (craftmaking) for the instruments, and the other applied typical simple prototyping techniques used within industrial design. Through selection of control factors, creation of orthogonal arrays, prototyping, and experimentation, the students were able to characterize the main effects of four control factors on the sound quality of the instruments, loudness or harmonics, and to explore the feasibility of robust design for instrument design.