Innovative Product Design via Digital Manufacturing

Catalog description

This hands-on/project-based course instructs students on methods to identify product concepts for machine designs with commercial potential. It combines lectures and field/lab activities on the new product development cycle: iterative design based on ethnographic fieldwork, team brainstorming, prototyping, testing/consumer feedback, and limitations set by mass manufacturing. Students -coming from diverse backgrounds and industry experience, and some currently working in different companies -will be teamed together to develop the new products.They will be given a common design challenge, and after observingand engagingwith real users, they will identify specific needs; then based on those needs each team will end up with a different problem definition and a different product. Industry advisersfrom real world companies will provide constant feedback throughout the semester.