Descrição:

The focus of this course is the integration of design, manufacturing and marketing in creating and promoting a new product. It may involve consideration of a virtual company, if adequate. The course is intended to provide the student with the following benefits: 1. Competence with a set of tools and methods for product design and development. 2. Confidence in the student’s own abilities to create a new product. 3. Awareness of the role of multiple functions in creating new products (e.g. industrial design, engineering, production, organization, marketing, finance). 4. Ability to coordinate multiple, interdisciplinary tasks in order to achieve a common objective in product design. 5. Reinforcement of specific knowledge from other courses through practice and reflection in an action-oriented setting. This is a 6 ECTS doctoral course. Accordingly, the course is designed to demand approximately 12 hours per week of the student’s time. It is expected that each student will prepare for and attend all of the class sessions and will regularly enhance class discussions. Classes will meet once a week, for up to 3 hours, during the full semester. Of the utmost importance though, are substantial and continuous contributions to the progress of the project. It is strongly expected that each student will develop a project well integrated in his/her doctoral research project. Projects: The course will span the entire semester. Central to the classes is the approach to conceive and design a new product and present a prototype in the final class session (a fully working prototype for simple products, or a prototype for a sub-assembly of the full product for complex products), which is expected to be well integrated in each student doctoral research project. The goal of this project is to learn principles and methods of product design and development and to appreciate the inherent multidisciplinary nature of the process, in the context of the student’s own research proposal. Project ideas and design decisions will come from the students in the class. The assignments for the course correspond to a staged approach to developing the product.