Course Description

Overview

The Product Engineering Processes course covers the engineering process of product design from conception to pre-production of a new product. The course teaches the creative design process through lectures and the creation, engineering, evaluation and prototype of a novel product. Students learn to identify and evaluate a problem (opportunity) and sketch, model, create, develop, test (verification, validation and risk analysis), and select best prototyping strategies for their product. Basic project, risk management, engineering, and analysis skills are used to deliver a robust working product on time and on budget. Fundamental principles and practices are emphasized and explored including design specifications, Occam's Razor, failure mode analysis, marketing and go to market strategy, professional responsibilities, and ethics. Students are assumed to be competent in basic problem solving and engineering skills.

Each semester will have a theme that is designed to focus the groups from Week 2.

Course Objective

The objective of the course is to enable students through lecture and hands-on experience to:

1. Learn the process of product design, based on the scientific method, by combining creative thinking with engineering principles, turning ideas into real products:
• Identify and evaluate a problem.
• Use fundamental principles and appropriate analysis and experiments to select and develop better prototypes and products.
• Generate and create strategies for solving problems
• Generate and create concepts for implementing the selected "best" strategy
• Break the concept into sub systems and develop those subsystems in order of significance
• Complete the detailed design of the sub systems and prototype, test, and debug them
• Document the results
• Improve presentation skills
2. Become familiar with fundamental design principles, prototype methods, and manufacturing and assembly techniques
3. Learn how to assess risk and manage projects to be "on-time" and "on-budget"
4. Generate a feasible go to market and communication strategy
5. Practice professionalism, be safety conscious, and maintain high ethical standards

The methods, theory, and deliverables in this class take place in real companies every day.

Lectures

The lecture schedule for 2022 is as follows:

Monday - 1pm in 10-250
Tuesday - 11am in E25-111
Friday - 1pm in 10-250

Major Deliverables

1. Ideas Presentations
2. Sketch Model Review
3. Mockup Review
4. Final Concept Selection
5. Assembly Drawing & Product Contract
6. Most Critical Module Review
7. Technical Review
8. Final Presentations