Understanding Product Engineering by Bas Flipsen When you look at an object, what do you see? The exterior is what meets the eye, but this course aims to explore what’s behind, underneath or inside. To take a physical object and do a product autopsy, with the goal of developing an understanding and appreciation for how products are made. Think of your smartphone. It may have a sleek exterior, but there’s so much more to it than you see at a glance. Through the process of disassembling products, we learn what’s under the surface. This course aims to inspire an appreciation for physical objects, the notion of looking at them from a different perspective. It’s about understanding products and product architectures. How are products physically made and how are parts connected with each other? What is the function of each part and how do they add up to the main function? Thinking about a part and why it’s engineered that way. How are things made and what would happen when you use a different material? Does it still function as it should? Get a basic understanding of every day products and how they are materialized. Learn to analyse a product and all of its interconnections. Explore the importance of sustainability and not disposing of products so easily. Ultimately, gain an appreciation for physical design which is useful for Design Project 1 as well as other future design projects. “I hope this course gets students to see products from a different perspective, to think about them differently than before. When they walk through a shop to look at a product not just as something to buy but to reason how it’s made, used, manufactured, why it exists. I really want to get students enthusiastic about physical objects.”
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