Name: Product Design and Development
ISBN: 9780073404776

Product Design and Development

"Treating such contemporary design and development issues as identifying customer needs, design for manufacturing, prototyping, and industrial design, Product Design and Development by Ulrich and Eppinger presents in a clear and detailed way a set of product development techniques aimed at bringing together the marketing, design, and manufacturing functions of the enterprise. The integrative methods in the book facilitate problem solving and decision making among people with different disciplinary perspectives, reflecting the current industry toward designing and developing products in cross-functional teams"-- "This book contains material developed for use in the interdisciplinary courses on product development that we teach. Participants in these courses include graduate students in engineering, industrial design students, and MBA students. While we aimed the book at interdisciplinary graduate-level audiences such as this, many faculty teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in engineering design have also found the material useful. Product Design and Development is also for practicing professionals. Indeed, we could not avoid writing for a professional audience because most of our students are themselves professionals who have worked either in product development or in closely related functions. This book blends the perspectives of marketing, design, and manufacturing into a single approach to product development.

What Hacker News says

ArtWombJan 2019

This is glorious! And actually saves me quite a bit of time. This subject extends much deeper than the rote teaching of "soft skills" to engineers. And is more akin to realizing one's own humanity ;)

I can also recommend a text called Product Design and Development used in the grad-level MIT class

http://www.ulrich-eppinger.net/

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robomartinNov 2013

Well, the truth of it is this hand did not cost $1,000 or $2,000. In other words, if you started from not having an initial design and iterated through the many designs leading up to the latest the picture is quite different. Add-up engineering costs at a reasonable rate and the total cost of executing a design --even for a diy case-- is significantly higher.

Once you get to a commercial enterprise things are quite different. Even a small-is company is likely to have 5 to 20 employees, rent, equipment, computers, software and other variable and fixed costs. In addition to that they need to provide sales and post-sales support and stand behind their product for many years. Prototyping and testing alone could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per iteration.

Product Design and Development [0] is a fantastic book that provides insight into the development process for a wide range of products. I have a 1995 edition. It goes from a screwdriver through to engine parts and the mechanical trackball on Apple's old laptops. If you've never been exposed to professional product development and are interested in learning more I'd recommend picking up an older version of this book ($200 for the latest version).

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Product-Design-Development-Karl-Ulrich...

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nrivadeneiraAug 2013

As a former mechanical engineer, it depends on your chosen course curriculum. Standard courses that all M.E.'s take generally don't cover topics like this. Instead, you deal at a more fundamental level with courses such as physics, calculus, statics and dynamics, heat transfer, thermodynamics, material sciences, etc. When other majors were allowed to take pretty much any elective, we were required to take 400 level engineering electives. This is where you had the option of choosing courses that would teach this sort of stuff. For example, I took a course in gear design which covered topics related to this. Another engineering elective I took was vehicle dynamics. Robotics courses are often an option for students as well.

As far as texts go, I would just search Google or Amazon for "Machine design". I don't have any particular recommendations because at the time I viewed text books with the same level of excitement as most other students, which is to say none at all. The two books that I did keep after college are the following: 1) Product Design and Development: http://www.amazon.com/Product-Design-Development-Karl-Ulrich... 2) Machine Design: An Integrated Approach: http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Design-Edition-Robert-Norton/d...

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akeckOct 2014

Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System (Sobek II and Smalley)

Data Smart: Using Data Science To Transform Information into Insight (Foreman)

An Everlasting Meal (Waters and Adler)

Product Design and Development (Ulrich et al)

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