Course Preview | Rapid Prototyping Methodologies for Commercial Application from MIT xPRO
2:15 min
30
Hello, I'm Martin Culpepper, and I'm going to be your instructor for the course. I have spent my entire professional life prototyping, helping companies the better leverage prototypes in their design processes and to teach them how to do this. I also teach MIT students how to do this, how to be good at rapid prototyping. Unlike most topics, what makes rapid prototyping useful isn't well encapsulated within books. Yes, there are books on the latest and the greatest fabrication processes, but that is only a small sliver of what rapid prototyping is all about. Effective rapid prototyping is about making good decisions. Good decisions that you get from information, you obtain from a prototype. The information that most rapidly and cost effectively helps you converge on a design. A design that yields the best product for your customer. Now, at first glance, rapid prototyping can seem very complex. And well, yes, there are many things to consider; fabrication processes, hypotheses about what works and doesn't work, cost, risks, probability that things will or won't work out, strategies for solving problems and assessing prototypes, so that you get the information that you want.
That is a lot. And I can imagine you are thinking, how am I going to keep all of that straight? Well, this course breaks all of this down in a structured way and provide you with a process, tools and templates that you can use in any prototyping and product design process. Use them to help you get the results that you need, all of that. The processes, tools and templates are in variant with time, meaning that it works for the fabrication processes that exist today, and no matter what fancy fabrication processes will exist in the future, the processes, tools and templates will still help you make good use of them. I hope that you will find this course informative, insightful, and useful in your efforts to maximize the bang for the buck that you get out of the prototypes that you create.
That is a lot. And I can imagine you are thinking, how am I going to keep all of that straight? Well, this course breaks all of this down in a structured way and provide you with a process, tools and templates that you can use in any prototyping and product design process. Use them to help you get the results that you need, all of that. The processes, tools and templates are in variant with time, meaning that it works for the fabrication processes that exist today, and no matter what fancy fabrication processes will exist in the future, the processes, tools and templates will still help you make good use of them. I hope that you will find this course informative, insightful, and useful in your efforts to maximize the bang for the buck that you get out of the prototypes that you create.
