Teaching Methods for Concept Design and Prototyping

In product development processes, the definition of an adequate design methodology allows to reduce the Time to Market (TTM) and create new products meeting user’s requirements. In particular, for a generic product the process starts from the Mission Statement, which gives a brief description of the product and its goals, underling target market and stakeholders, assumptions and constrains that guide product development. Hence, in the early steps of the development process, alternative concepts of new products are generated, evaluated and then selected for further development and testing. In this phase, the first activities consist in identifying customer needs and establishing target specifications. Following actions regard concepts generation and selection. In this context new technologies, such as knowledge based engineering and rapid prototyping have a significant impact on the reduction of the time and costs needed to verify the technical and functional aspects of the project. This paper reports the teaching experience carried out in the course of “Project Methodologies for Industrial Engineering” of the second degree course (MSc) in Mechanical Engineering of the Second Faculty of Engineering at the University of Bologna. The aim of this course is to supply students with design methodologies and all the related activities that are at the basis of concept development and prototyping. Therefore, students are directly involved, through a design experience, in the creation of a new product from some defined topics and issues. Besides the conceptual design and the Computer Aided Design specification of the product students experience the rapid prototyping of the designed shape by means of a FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) technique. In the projects of the last academic year, students, working in groups up to 4 persons, were requested to design a helmet, with an advanced level of customization. Following the phases of the design process, their ideas evolved into new products, which addressed latent needs defined in accordance with the typology and functions of the helmet chosen by each team and compared to similar existing products. Therefore, each project resulted in significant different products concerning several markets in spite of the few same guiding indications and workflow. By this teaching approach, it is possible to transmit course’s contents through students’ direct experience and applying product design concepts and innovative technologies on a specific case study. In this way, the final step of the paper is to compare the different projects, and underline in each of them the workflow of each product design and how each team developed the ideas of future engineers