Impart âdesign for productionâ knowledge by application of functional prototyping

In engineering design the early consideration of ‘Design for Production’ aspects is of particular importance to avoid high costs and time efforts caused by late redesign iterations. In design education this knowledge needs to be imparted theoretically as well as practically. Students have to experience the consequences of incorrect estimations or incomplete design definition when producing. This paper presents an educational project work that was recently carried out as a part of the ‘Innovation Process’ course at ETH Zurich with 550 participating undergraduate students of mechanical engineering. The project work especially includes the production of physical prototypes, which provides the advantage of making design knowledge more tangible. The paper presents the differences of simple funky prototypes and more complex functional prototypes and reflects their application in the context of educational objectives with a special focus on imparting ‘Design for Production’ knowledge.