In Industrial Design, students investigating product development have the opportunity to work closely with their counterparts majoring in engineering design, manufacturing, management and other disciplines outside RISD’s academic purview. Modeled on a groundbreaking curriculum and textbook by MIT professors Steven Eppinger and Karl Ulrich, the course Product Design and Development pairs RISD’s aspiring designers with MIT students who offer a business and/or engineering perspective; in the pursuit of intelligent solutions to specific product challenges, the team formula has produced remarkable results. During the 2007–08 academic year, a new extension of the course will also bring RISD students together with their peers at the business-focused Babson College in Wellesley, MA.

“Effective development of products is an interdisciplinary process,” says Matt Kressy [RISD ’88, Industrial Design], a critic in RISD’s Industrial Design Department who has taught the course for nearly a decade. The complexities involved in conceiving, building and marketing new products aren’t solved within a single professional field; the process demands expertise in such varied areas as product planning, customer needs analysis, concept development and testing, financial analysis, design for manufacturing, intellectual property and project management. It makes sense, then, to form teams of students to come at the challenge from different angles and work together to develop viable, real-world solutions.

For the spring 2007 course, students joined in groups of six to eight and worked on a variety of perceived market opportunities, some proposed by students and others defined by corporate sponsors. One team worked with Nokia on an ingenious fingertip-controlled wireless device to assist travelers in unfamiliar cities. General Motors sponsored exploration of a real-time video entertainment system for use in cars, and the Cambridge, MA nonprofit Design That Matters challenged another team to develop a low-cost infant incubator for hospitals in Nepal. Other projects included products for frequent travelers, a cycling jacket with adjustable insulation, and Eat and Greet, which promises to “solve the world’s socializing problem” by enabling party guests to hold both plate and drink in one hand. Visit the image gallery for more on these and other projects created in Product Design and Development.