IDE Paper

International conference on engineering and product design education

12-13 September 2019, Department of Design, Manufacturing and Engineering Management, University of Strathclyde, united kingdom

Becoming excited about getting things made: teaching manufacturing processes in the first-year design classroom

Soumitri Varadarajan¹, Brittney Wheeler¹, Gavin Bufton¹, William Dim¹ and Helen McLean¹

¹RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

Keywords: Teaching Manufacturing Process, Industrial Design Engineering, Blended Learning

ABSTRACT

The industrial designer has to know about manufacturing processes to be able to effectively design products for manufacture. However, in the contemporary period the rise of producerism, or designer-maker movement, has complicated the traditional notion of what manufacturing processes the designer has to know. Where in the past the focus was predominantly upon mass production, in the contemporary period the designer’s passion takes them into the territories such as the revisiting the traditional processes, or forays into experimental futuristic processes which are quite rare and still relatively inaccessible. A unique form of design innovation that has thus emerged is one where the manufacturing process defines the form generatively, and where the design process is one of experimentation and an exploration of the unknown. This embodiment of manufacturing adventurism within the persona of the designer is seldom addressed within the traditional way manufacturing process is taught to the student.

Additionally, in this program manufacturing processes had been transmissively taught through slides and students were required to be passive recipients of information. In redesigning this course to encourage deeper and more active engagement of students, we looked at what we could potentially do in the 12-week semester schedule, and in addition determined that we could at best do 10 mainstream processes. We however saw this as a problem as students typically work in areas that use traditional processes, and want to explore futuristic processes, both of which are currently outside the curriculum scope. Our solution was to flip the classroom and offer the 10 processes to the students as a video and quiz platform for self-study. We thus emptied out the classroom of structured content and cleared 36 hours of face to face studio work for the semester. We redesigned the semester to include a project-intensive, a few factory visits, independent student projects and a folio project that was pitched as a personal vendor source book that each student developed as a manual and local resource for making products.

At the end of the semester we undertook an evaluation of student experience, to gauge and study the impact of the new design of the curriculum and method of study. The paper presents the outcomes of the evaluation, the student feedback and describes the changes being implemented in the next phase of this teaching program.