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CASE STUDY IN RAPID PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT by Garrett L. Winther Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science at the ARCHIVES Massachusetts Institute of Technology MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY June 2011 OCT 202011 @ 2011 Garrett Winther All Rights Reserved LIBRARIES The author hereby grants to MIT permission to reproduce and to distribute publicly paper and electronic copies of this thesis document in whole or in part in any medium now known or hereafter created. Signature of Author Department of Mechanical Engineering May 16, 2011 Certified by aria C. Yang Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems Accepted by John H. Lienhard V. Mechanical Engineering Undergraduate Officer Chairman, Undergraduate Thesis Committee CASE STUDY IN RAPID PRODUCT DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT by Garrett L. Winther Submitted to the Department of Mechanical Engineering on May 16, 2011 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering ABSTRACT This thesis explores a new strategy in developing products quickly, cheaply and efficiently, with the hopes to redefine the paradigms behind the product design process. This was carried out through the development of the product "flatRat", a commemorative MIT novelty ring. With this product, we explored different prototyping techniques, manufacturing processes, and business strategies with the hope to optimize the process for others to carry out similar projects. This thesis summarizes a selection of work from the development of flatRat from concept generation to final product sales. The ultimate goal of this project was to bring a product to life with limited resources. From the project's beginning in June, 2009 to its capstone in February, 2011, flatRat was designed and developed fully into a marketable product followed by an initial manufacturing run of 500 units. These were sold to MIT's Class of 2013 Ring Committee and given away to attendants of the "Ring Premiere" Ceremony on February 11, 2011. This product is currently being developed further to be sold at the MIT Museum and Campus Bookstore. The process developed around this product is currently being implemented at Olin College of Engineering under Dr. Lawrence Neeley. Thesis Supervisor: Maria Yang Title: Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOW LEDG EM ENTS ..................................................................................................................... 3 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 5 1 CO NCEPT GENERATION ............................................................................................................. 6 1.1 BENCHM A RKING......................................................................................................... 8 1.2 BRA INSTO RM ING ......................................................................................................... 10 2 CO NCEPT SELECTIO N................................................................................................................... 16 2.1 The "flatRat"...................................................................................................................16 3 PRO TOTY PING .............................................................................................................................. 18 3.1 VISUA L PROTOTYPING ............................................................................................. 18 3.2 PA PER PROTOTYPING................................................................................................ 19 3.3LASER CU l ING ......................................................................................................... 34 3.3.1 LASER PROTOTYPING .............................................................................. 38 4 CHEM ICA L ETCHING .................................................................................................................... 46 4.1 DESIGNING FOr CHEMICAL ETCHING .................................................................... 46 4.2 CHEMICAL ETCHING PROTOTYPING....................................................................... 50 4 FINA L PRO DUCT ........................................................................................................................... 58 5 DISCUSSIO N .................................................................................................................................. 63 REFERENCES .................................................................................................................................... 66 APPENDICES .............................................................................................. 67 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the influence of my two project advisors Prof. Maria Yang and Dr. Lawrence Neeley. They were both invaluable resources to both the thesis project and my development as a designer and engineer. Their continued involvement and excitement has been the backbone of this project and I will always be grateful for their help. I would also like to acknowledge the work of Paul Uche '13 who assisted with a almost every aspect of the final production of flatRat. His involvement was a tremendous help and made the thesis a true success. Lastly, I would like to thank MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering who funded this project for the past two years along with providing the facilities to make it possible. Introduction There are a multitude of product development strategies being implemented throughout industry, all with the hopes of bringing profitable ideas to market. An idea usually needs a considerable amount of money, time and man power to fully develop itself from a promising concept to a profitable item. There are exceptions to these standards, but most products on store shelves are backed by large amounts of money with vast resources for prototyping, marketing and distribution. This leaves a significant barrier to entry into the product market to those who cannot overcome the standard cost associated with product development and distribution. The goal of this project is to develop new avenues that a product can come to life , focusing to minimize time and resources in its development. By doing so, we hope to make the product development process more accessible and allow more ideas to come to market from a variety of backgrounds. We are exploring these strategies via several products that allow us to test our new processes first hand while assessing and optimizing their potential for widespread use. The flagship product of this research project is the "flatRat", a foldable MIT class ring, also know as the "Brass Rat". Over the past two years, we have explored a multitude of tools under this concept and it has developed into a complete product we are currently producing and selling. This paper will outline the development of the "flatRat" and highlight our exploration into prototyping, manufacturing, and distribution strategies that will in turn, apply back to a process that makes product development accessible to a wider range of people. It should be made clear that the goal of this project is not to redefine design process in large companies or for designers that have the knowledge to adequate produce their products, but rather develop new strategies to make product development available to a new audience. There is currently a large population of inexperienced designers that will benefit from a renovated and consolidated design process, which we hope to deliver. I Concept Generation The first part of any product development process is generating a concept. This time is incredibly crucial to the rest of the process and ultimately leads to the success of a product. Most products are derived to fill a user need or fill a user need better than an existing solution. Our products ultimately look to do the same, but the foundation of the process is changed due to the constraints and goals of the project. Rather than generating concepts specifically around user needs, we focused our idea generation around low cost manufacturing processes. This allows us to control the rest of the process for any idea as long as it fits first within this first manufacturing constraint. If we left it unconstrained, ideas would potentially arise that were out of the scope of our process and require complex manufacturing or assembly. For example, if an idea required complex 3D surfaces it would potentially call for injection molding or some other similar manufacturing process. Though these aren't completely out of reach, they come with a set of potential issues and details that would be overly complex for the initial stages of our project and may be out of scope for the first iteration of our process. That being said, we decided to begin with simple, 2 dimensional manufacturing processes and set boundaries for ideas to only be manufactured in that space. The decision to limit to specific manufacturing processes gives a good set of boundaries for what a product might be within our process, but doesn't create too great of limits such that new and interesting ideas cannot come out of it. The most important aspect of this decision is that we can control the more detailed steps later in the process, such as prototyping