The nature of New Product Development (NPD) is poorly understood by undergraduate engineering students but can be a challenging and rewarding career for those who chose to work in the field. The aim of this project was to provide a web-based tool that would make the design elements of undergraduate courses more attractive by showing how knowledge translates to real products and to provide real life examples of the design process to help students to 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 both engineering designers and industrial designers. 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 web site is available at www.colab.lboro.ac.uk

* To make the design elements of undergraduate courses more attractive by showing how knowledge translates to real products

 

* To provide real life examples of the design process and products to students to help understand abstract engineering design principles

 

* To develop an easy to use web resource and model of implementation so that it can be adopted by other institutions

 

* To embed the web resource into modules in engineering and design departments

 

* To disseminate the web resource through RAEng, HESTEM and the Engineering and ADM Subject Centres to maximise uptake and impact

The outcome is an design online tool that provides a high level of information that is easily used by students, academic staff and practitioners. The functionality of CoLab tool is based on only three tabs: “Home”, ”Use Colab” and “Information”. In addition to these, the Home page also features a large button to “Get started with Colab”.

 

The full functionality of CoLab is presented on a single page which gives access to the tabs for “Design Stages”, “Design Information”, “Technical Information” and “Design Representations”. Clicking on these tabs gives access to the individual cards which allow linking to other cards that appear in the “% ” columns. One of the most significant features and achievements of the site is the taxonomy of design representations which allows immediate browsing of all 35 images under the headings of Sketches, Drawings, Models and Prototypes.

 

The CoLab website is available at www.colab.lboro.ac.uk

 

If you wish to know more about this project, please contact the Programme's Engineering team at HESTEM@raeng.org.uk with Reference Number 2010MAY_13.