Syllabus

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General Information

Teaching Staff:
Prof. Steven Eppinger
Dr. Daniel Whitney
Mr. Matt Kressy
Prof. Thomas Roemer
Dr. Clifford Whitcomb
Dr. Ali Yassine
TA: Ingrid Huang

Course Objectives

The focus of Product Design and Development is integration of the marketing, design, and manufacturing functions of the firm in creating a new product. The course is intended to provide you with the following benefits:

• Competence with a set of tools and methods for product design and development.
• Confidence in your own abilities to create a new product.
• Awareness of the role of multiple functions in creating a new product (e.g. marketing, finance, industrial design, engineering, production).
• Ability to coordinate multiple, interdisciplinary tasks in order to achieve a common objective.
• Reinforcement of specific knowledge from other courses through practice and reflection in an action-oriented setting.

Expectations

This is a 12-unit graduate course. Accordingly, the course has been designed to demand approximately 12 hours per week of your time. It is expected that each student will prepare for and attend all of the class sessions and will contribute regularly and substantially to their team project. Experience with project-based design courses is that students often develop high expectations for their projects and devote substantially more time than is required by the instructors. Faculty applaud this enthusiasm, but this course will not penalize students who establish a twelve hour per week average time constraint for their efforts. The workload for the course is fairly smooth, with increased project effort at the end of the semester offset by lighter preparation for class.

Academic Integrity

Full group and class collaboration on all aspects of this course is highly encouraged. It is almost impossible to share too much information in product development teams.

Reading Materials

The primary reading materials for the class are the book Product Design and Development (2nd Edition, 2000), written by Profs. Ulrich and Eppinger, and a reading packet. The text is available at the MIT Coop, MIT Press, and through internet booksellers. The reading packet is available for purchase at the MIT Copy Technology Center. Handouts of additional readings will be distributed in class.

Class Preparation and Participation

Reading assignments are given in the Class Schedule for each class session. You are expected to come to class prepared to discuss the readings and the suggested questions. Your individual class participation grade will be based upon your in-class remarks during discussions.

Projects

Your challenge in the project portion of this course is to design a new product and to produce a prototype version of it. The goal of this exercise is to learn principles and methods of product development in a realistic context. Most product development professionals work under tremendous time pressure and do not have an opportunity to reflect on the development process. In this course, the project stress level will be low enough that there will be time to experiment and learn. Project ideas come from the students in the class and from opportunities presented by industrial sponsors. Guidelines for reasonable projects are given below. The project proposal process is explained in the Project Schedule section of this syllabus.

Project Teams

In the second week of the course, we will form project teams on the basis of expressed student preferences (see the Project Schedule for details). Teams will consist of about seven students. Once you are assigned to a project team, we expect you to stay in the course for the entire term.

Project Materials and Expenses

There is a limited amount of funds to cover students’ out-of-pocket expenses related to the course projects. Each team will be allocated a budget of $1000. Instructions and forms for purchasing and reimbursement are given in the document “Buying Things for Class” which is found on the course web site. If your project requires additional expenditures, your team is expected to cover these expenses personally.

Intellectual Property Rights

The student teams will generally be able to retain the rights to any inventions they develop in this course. If a team should decide to pursue a patent, they may do this on their own. Alternatively, the team can “share” their invention with MIT which may be interested in patenting it, in exchange for a portion of any licensing royalties. Teams should spend some time during an early meeting agreeing in advance on how to distribute any economic rewards arising from the intellectual property you create. Your project assignments will serve as a dated record of the evolution of your ideas.

Guidelines for Projects

While special cases will be considered, you are strongly encouraged to choose a project satisfying all of the following constraints:

• There should be a demonstrable market for the product. One good way to verify a market need is to identify existing products that attempt to meet the need. Your product need not be a variant of an existing product, but the market need addressed by your product should be clearly evident. The product does not need to have a tremendous economic potential, but should at least be an attractive opportunity for an established firm with related products and/or skills.
• Most products developed in this class are material goods and not services. While many of the ideas in the course apply to services and software products (for example, customer needs and product architecture), many do not (for example, design for manufacturing). Nevertheless, the faculty are willing to hear project proposals from students interested in developing software, services, and internet based enterprises.
• The product should have a high likelihood of containing fewer than 10 parts. Although you cannot anticipate the design details, it is easy to anticipate that an electric drill will have more than 10 parts and that a garlic press can have fewer than 10.
• You should be confident of being able to prototype the product for less than $1000. For example, a razor like Gillette’s Mach3 may have about 10 parts, but would require tens of thousands of dollars to create a geometrically accurate prototype.
• The product should require no basic technological breakthroughs. (Yes, a more compact airbag would be a nice, but can you do it without inventing a new chemical?) You do not have time to deal with large technological uncertainties.
• You should have access to more than five potential lead users of the product (more than 20 would be nice). For example, you would have great difficulty researching agricultural irrigation systems without leaving Cambridge.

A few more hints

• Save any highly proprietary ideas for another context; we will be quite open in discussing the projects in class and do not wish to be constrained by proprietary information.
• Most successful projects tend to have at least one team member with strong personal interest in the target market.
• It is really nice to have a connection to a commercial venture that may be interested in the product. (One group signed a licensing agreement with a major mail order and retail company with which they had made contact during the first week of the course. The product they developed became a commercial success.)
• Most products are really not very well designed. This is evidenced by the seemingly poor quality of common consumer products (utility knives, garlic presses, and ice cream scoops, for example). The experience in this class is that if you pick almost any product satisfying the above project guidelines, you will be able to develop a product that is superior to everything currently on the market. A book titled THE DESIGN OF EVERYDAY THINGS by Donald A. Norman (Doubleday, 1990) discusses good and bad examples and provides principles and guidelines for good design.
• Just because you have used a lousy product doesn't mean that a better one doesn't exist. Do some thorough research to identify competitive products and solutions.

Some Project Examples from Previous Classes