Late stages of product design for users in low-income settings.
Design for Scale is a hands-on class for students who want to understand what happens after a prototype works. You’ll work on real projects with partners in low-resource settings and explore the practical decisions that determine whether a product can actually reach users, be manufactured, and create value in the field.
The course goes beyond design and prototyping to cover the next layer of product development: design for manufacturability, cost planning, value chain analysis, stakeholder management, product requirements, testing, and scale-up strategy. It’s a good fit for students interested in product design, global health, hardware, entrepreneurship, international development, or the messy real-world process of bringing useful products to market.
Past projects have included;
- Analyzing the best type of manufacturing for a product (based on cost and performance requirements) that had been rotationally molded as a prototype
- Re-designing a complex part to decrease tooling and production costs (Cameroon)
- Optimizing product geometry for DFM (Hong Kong)
About the Instructors
The course is taught by instructors from D-Lab with deep field experience and industry experts from product development consulting and consumer product design, including Macauley Kenney and Michael Bono.
The faculty member of record for the course is Maria Yang (Professor of Mechanical Engineering; Associate Dean, School of Engineering).