N90211 Industrial Design

The Industrial Design course allows to acquire and to experiment tools and techniques to support the development of the concept, design, engineering, production and marketing of a new product. At the end of the course the student will then have all the necessary skills to follow, manage and contribute substantially to all the strategic and operational phases of a project to launch a new product.

Upon completion of the course, the student will have developed the necessary knowledge to follow a project to invent and launch a new product.

• The first part provides skills related to marketing and creativity, skills necessary for the development of the product concept
• The second part provides technical skills on the design of all the operational phases necessary for the new idea to arrive concretely on the market (engineering and manufacturing)
• In the last phase, the economic feasibility of the new idea will be verified through the necessary economic and financial plans.

The aforementioned phases are not seen as separated, one from the other, but as a single continuous process.

The course is divided into 4 distinct but well coordinated modules, which trace the new product development process:

1. The design and development of the new product concept
2. Product engineering
3. The design and construction of the production plant
4. Business planning and economic-financial evaluation

International students - you can enroll  for one, two, three module(s) (3 ECTS each) or for the entire course (4 modules,12 ECTS)

In order to give students the opportunity to concretely apply the topics proposed in the course, real products will be proposed (different each year) on which to develop innovation within a working group. During the course two different didactic moments will alternate: the theoretical lessons and the tutorships:

• Traditional lectures are designed to provide students with the essential tools to develop each phase of the development of the new product
• Tutorships are destined for concrete work on products together with teachers, so as to face any specific problem. They are a fundamental component of the course!

The Industrial Design course aims to be a point of contact between academic experience and business life, not only from the point of view of contents but also the organizational and design methods that characterize it (team working, reporting, deadlines, etc. .)

The exam consists of two parts:

• a project work carried out in a group (60% on the final grade)
• an individual test (40% on the final grade)

The group project work consists in the concrete realization of all the steps necessary to bring a new product to the market: from marketing analysis, to engineering, to production choices up to the overall economic evaluation of the initiative; each group will be compsed by a maximum of five students. For each of the four development phases, the group will produce a synthetic report according to the specifications and timings defined by each reference teacher.
The whole project, in all its parts, will then have to be presented, one week after the final delivery before the examining commission (made up of all course teachers). Being an exam, the presence of all group members at the presentation is mandatory. The evaluation of the project is equal to the average of the assessments assigned by each professor: (i) to his / her own part and (ii) to the presentation (clarity, conciseness and effectiveness). Each part of the project must still reach a minimum score of 15; otherwise the single part must be redone / completed / implemented. There will be a competition between the projects developed by the various groups so that at the end of the course a winning project, a second and a third classified will be proclaimed. The winning project will receive 3 bonus points (2 the second and 1 the third) which will be added to the project evaluation Historically, the best results have been achieved by the groups who immediately started the project work and intensively exploited the tutorships

The written exam is a closed-books individual test composed by 3 open questions (conceptual questions and not related to the project work) on the four parts carried out during the course. Each professor will prepare the question and correct the answer on his/her part. The extraction of the 3 questions is random. The exam grade is the arithmetic mean of the grade assigned to each of the 3 answers, provided that there are no answers with a score lower than 15. Otherwise it is necessary to repeat the entire written test.

If the exam will be in distance, the written exam is replaced by an oral exam while the project work is not modified (except for the presentation that will be in distance).

If you are enrolled for 3 or 4 modules: the distance oral exam is an individual test with 2 questions (conceptual and not related to the project work). Each of the 2 professors present at the exam will propose 1 question on his/her module, the selection of the 2 professors is random. The exam grade is the arithmetic mean of the grade assigned to each of the 2 answers, provided that there are no answers with a grade lower than 15. Otherwise, the entire test must be repeated.

If you are enrolled for 1 or 2 module(s): the same rules presented above apply but with 1 question (of course on the module(s) attended).