Statistical Design Applied to Product Design

Abstract

Great interest has been stimulated by Genichi Taguchi and his co-workers in the application of statistically designed experiments to industrial product design. Language difficulties (Japanese to English to Statistics) have served to obscure many of the ideas offered by Taguchi. This paper is an attempt to describe some aspects of the “Taguchi Method” and particularly to review some of the tools of statistics employed: the choice of experimental design, the role of interactions, and the effects of data transformations.