Communicating and Contextualising New Product Development Tools and Methods for Engineering Students

A web-based tool has been designed to make the design elements of undergraduate courses in New Product Development (NPD) more attractive. It does this by showing how knowledge translates to real products and by providing real life examples of the design process to help students understand and relate to abstract engineering design principles. Some of the content of the tool, called CoLab, was derived from a PhD that was undertaken at Loughborough Design School by Dr Eujin Pei and supervised by Dr Mark Evans (with a background in industrial design) and Dr Ian Campbell (with a background in engineering design). The CoLab website supports understanding in the nature of NPD by providing 35 examples of the key sketches, drawings, models and prototypes that are used by engineering designers and industrial designers. Figure 1 shows an image of a Study Sketch (from the Sketches section of the CoLab tool) and Figure 2 an Experimental Prototype (from the Prototype section of the CoLab design tool). Figure 1: Image of a Study Sketch Figure 2: Image of an Experimental prototype To facilitate understanding and collaboration, the taxonomy is extended to provide information on the different ways in which engineering designers and industrial designers use the 35 design representations i.e. when they are used and what types of information (design or technical). The CoLab tool is of interest to engineering students and students interested in engineering from secondary school to undergraduate/masters and early career practitioners. The web site is available at www.colab.lboro.ac.uk