Prototyping skills for product designers - a teaching methodology based on mechanical hand-held products

摘要

The demand for product designers has been growing in the United Kingdom as manufacturing companies strive to meet growing global competition to sell products. Increasing competition has placed greater emphasis on manufacturers to strive for continuous product improvement and ~ make the substantial investment in design this usually demands. However, manufacturers of low technology, hand-held products, typically, small to medium-sized manufacturing companies (SMEs) cannot afford to employ large multi-disciplined design teams committed solely to the generation of new product ideas [1]. Such companies are forced to rely instead on small groups of individuals who are able to cross traditional subject boundaries in contributing to the process of product innovation. The ways of working adopted by these individuals requires them to combine the traditional skills of industrial designers [2] and design engineers [3] and to become increasingly broad-based in their work [4]. The needs of SMEs for broad-based, graduate designers have been addressed by British universities, but some institutions have found it difficult to provide the practical resources for students to engage in the designing and making activities that are essential ingredients in the education of such designers [4]. Designers working in SMEs need an appropriate set of skills, in particular, they need the skills to extract, assess and use the ideas embodied in successful past products. If designers are able to extract the knowledge residing in the everyday world of designed products, that knowledge can he made available to generate new product ideas [5]. However, new product ideas cannot be evaluated without making functioning prototypes and it is the teaching of prototyping skills that has become problematic on many design courses in British universities.