Cutting Board
Scale
Skills Used
Project Management, Design, Communication, Project Scheduling, SolidWorks, Time Management, Product Development, Team Leadership, Product Development, Customer/ Market Research, Stakeholder Research, Presentation
This project was designed to teach my classmates and I how to design a product with manufacturability in mind. Additionally, the class helped us develop an understanding of the initial stages of the product life cycle.
The Mission
Do stakeholder research and design a product that is a mixture of two other products.
A Snapshot of the Project
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Modeled key pieces in SolidWorks.
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Conducted consumer research to understand needs and distilled them into product benchmarks using a QFD model.
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Conducted material research to ensure food safety.
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Crafted Product architecture.
Journey to Success
My group and I started the project by searching for common issues that plagued college students. We recognized that a common complaint from our peers was the lack of space in dorms/apartments. My team and I further narrowed down our scope to college students who cook and meal prep.
Once we narrowed down our customer group, we began to do customer research. We accounted for both our customers’ needs and our competitors’ products using our Quality Function Deployment (QFD). The QFD allowed us to gain a better understanding of what features were most important to our customers, as well as the relative importance of these features.
From there, we did research to determine what materials should be used to ensure food safety and sturdiness the battery life necessary to maximize user convenience, the loads our device needed to bear without malfunctioning, along with a number of other criteria.
The next step was understanding what the main systems were, and how they would interact with each other; essentially, we wanted to build our Product Architecture.
We then made an inventory of all the materials necessary to build our functional cutting board scale and priced them to create a bill of materials. This helped us develop an effective measure of production costs and pricing.
Our final step was designing the product. With the mixture of customer needs, our specifications, and an inventory of materials necessary to build our product, we developed our design.
Results
We completed all the necessary steps to show our understanding of the initial stages of designing a product keeping the customer in mind as well as manufacturing needs.
The Tasks I Undertook
I modeled key pieces of the product in SolidWorks. I crafted the product architecture and key parts of the QFD. I conducted customer research to determine what market space we need to focus on. Finally, I conducted materials research to find the best materials to achieve our customer needs.
Lessons Learned Along The Way
The cutting board helped me understand how product developers interpret customer feedback and market research in order to design a new product or feature. I also learned how to rank these customer desires in relative importance and create a design that takes into account different manufacturing methods.