Overview
2.009, Product Design Processes, is intended to provide students with a team-based product development experience. Students will design and build working alpha prototypes of new products, learning about creativity, product design, teamwork, and working within a budget in a unifying engineering experience. The class is intended to emulate what engineers might experience in a design team at a modern product development firm. As part of a corporate innovation strategy, students will create product opportunities inspired by a very broad product theme.
The effort spans the early phases of product development, including: opportunity identification; generating ideas; gathering customer and market data; selecting ideas; devising concepts and building and testing sketch models; assembly design; embodiment design; and the construction of a high quality functioning alpha prototype.
The large teams of approximately 15-20 individuals must work effectively to realize this task, so students also learn about group dynamics, team roles and management, consensus building, and the value of communication.
At the end of the course, teams present their work to a live audience of ~1100 practicing product designers, entrepreneurs, academics, and classmates, as well as a significant live webcast audience—in the tens-of-thousands.
Products and final presentations from previous years of 2.009, along with project milestone presentations, are available in the 2.009 gallery ↗.
Key Goals
2.009 is about experiencing the process, energy, and excitement of identifying new opportunities, developing products, engineering details, improving design skills, and learning strategies/processes for successful innovation that makes a difference. Some of the key goals follow.
- Improve creative-thinking capability.
- Improve ability to identify the significant product opportunities, and to develop appropriate solutions through a structured product development process.
- Improve expertise in constructing models for reasoning about design alternatives. These include estimations, sketches, sketch models, spreadsheets, geometric models, mockups and prototypes.
- Improve engineering expertise and proficiency in techniques for building high quality product models and prototypes.
- Learn about and experience structured methods for working in large teams on a project that requires teamwork to be successful.
- Improve presentation skills using a wide variety of media.
- Develop an understanding of, and enthusiasm for, the engineering activities involved with designing a new product.
- Develop an appreciation for the significance of societal contributions that can be made as a technological innovator.
Lectures
Lectures are in-person and incorporate many team-based activities.
Team Meetings (Labs)
All team meetings are in the Pappalardo Lab conference rooms. Team and section assignments are established after the first week of class, and team meetings begin the second week of class.
The course is organized around the team meetings which are used to define the product development process. Lab notes with recommended activities for each week are posted on the course website.
Milestones and Key Dates
Central to the 2.009 experience is student participation in milestones in the design process. Every student is expected to attend all milestones. Students, please check your calendar to ensure that you can attend these milestones. Any conflicts should be reported to the course staff, 2009ta@mit.edu, as soon as possible.
- Opportunities presentations
- Feasibility model review
- Concept review
- Architecture review
- Technical review
- Prototype Launch (Final Presentation)