Tweaking product design and development

Abstract

New faculty faced with preparation for a course in product design and development must address a wide range of topics ranging from entrepreneurship to hard core engineering. Some resources available to the faculty are heavy on the business side of the problem and somewhat lighter on the technological and engineering side. To more effectively balance these topics, tweaking of available resources must be done. In general, these types of courses involve a project that produces a 3D solid computer model of the product, or a physical prototype. An inevitable consequence of this is that either existing products must be designed (actually copied) for the project, or intellectual property must be considered. This paper discusses three areas of refinement to commonly available resources, two of which are technical in nature and one of which is entrepreneurial. They are: (1) enhancement of engineering considerations in computer modeling, (2) emphasis on manufacturing with an eye toward restoring a competitive North American manufacturing base, and (3) handling the issue of intellectual property when innovation is desired as part of the project. Students in Industrial Technology and Engineering Technology may not be exposed to the same level of mathematical rigor as straight discipline-specific Engineering majors. However, they often use the same tools as the Engineer once they are in the workforce. Industrial design students should understand some of the background and implications of their designs that can come out of the design programs that their employer may require them to use in order to avoid the problem of designing in a vacuum. We address this by going into some detail in two areas of usage of typical design programs such as SolidWorks: stress concentration and material selection. While this can be done without the computer, it is most effective if a 3D program is available to all students and that program has the capability to do three things: model assemblies, specify or select engineering material properties of the components, and perform finite element analyses. The North American manufacturing base was exported off-shore primarily in response to relatively short-sighted profit maximization considerations. This may actually turn out to have been a negative net present value approach when other factors of more long term consequence are considered. Lean manufacturing (and modified versions thereof) and automation are tools that can be used to help improve manufacturing competitiveness. In at least one well-known resource, the authors of the textbook say that they do not wish to be bound by the constraints of intellectual property management in a course. A key internal motivator for students is that flicker of light when they have seen that they can do something that is meaningful, possible, innovative and theirs. While one approach is to assign a project, and another is to limit the course to public domain prior art in an effort to avoid intellectual property issues, we find it to be a more effective student motivator to allow innovation that could result in valuable intellectual property for the student. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.