Product Archaeology – Draft Activity Plan

EGR 101, Fall 2012

Practice assignment descriptions:

  • Pre “hydration scenario.”
  • Students document their own (or a family member’s – small child, elderly relative, etc.) dental hygiene process
  • Read and comment on the article on dental hygiene
  • Manufacturing attributes of kitchen / bath related items
  • Create an assembly drawing for the dental floss container
  • Redesign the dental hygiene process (in class activity)
  • Student prep for teaming MEA activity
  • Assessment of teaming behavior after MEA activity
  • Post hydration scenario.

Competency assignment descriptions:

  • Present to their teams about an assignedmfg process (presentation competency #1)
  • Discuss the detailed design considerations related to manufacturing for their redesign of the dental hygiene experience (design process application #2)

Class Period 1 – Setting the Stage (Thursday, 9/13)

  • Remind students about the hydration scenario they submitted – engineering impacts our daily lives, and our daily lives impact engineering.
  • Warm Up Brainstorming Activity: Desert Island -- (5 – 10 minutes each)
  • Show Gilligan’s Island intro. 
  • Prompt 1: As an engineer, you are a problem solver. What are the things you would design/make first to help you survive? I wonder if the hydration scenario will help seed this conversation.
  • Prompt 2: Assume one of your fellow cast-aways is a dentist and ranks dental hygiene atop her list of “must-haves”. What on the island could you use to take care of your teeth and gums?
  • Follow-up conversation points
  • Is there any reality to the ideas that were suggested? There might be locations or cultures that do in fact use some of the things found on an island (e.g., “twigs” “bark”, etc)?
  • From a historical perspective—what did we do before sonicare and crest whitening toothpaste?
  • Framing – many of us think about engineering related to buildings, cars, machines, etc. Engineering is all around us. Moreover, embedded in many of the products we use every day is a set of cultural norms that influence how/why they were designed the way they are.
  • For the next couple weeks, we’ll be responding to a call from Sparky Dental Industries. They heard how well you designed the cauldron for the International Olympic Committee and now would like you to analyze our culture’s dental hygiene process. Specifically, they’d like us to engage in a process that lets us investigate/analyze what we use for dental hygiene, how it’s made, how much it costs, and why.
  • Let’s start by uncovering what we already have.
  • Students get out the toothbrushes they brought in and discuss in teams:
  • What were the differences between toothbrushes (functional, aesthetically, etc.). How would they describe their toothbrushes (what are they made of? How many bristles, etc.?).
  • If they brought in new toothbrushes have them also focus on the packaging
  • Teams report out key points from their discussion.
  • Class activity
  • Based on report outs from teams, develop groupings/categorizations of toothbrushes.
  • Time permitting, groupings are done more than once. (Solve problems in multiple ways!)
  • Systems thinking: we’ve talked about toothbrushes now. Is there more to the dental health industry than just toothbrushes? We’ve talked about you and your toothbrush – who else is a stakeholder in the dental hygiene system? 10 – 15 minutes
  • Map out all the stakeholders in the dental hygiene industry. (e.g., dentists, toothpaste companies, consumers, etc.)
  • Practice Assignment: each student documents their own dental hygiene process.
  • Practice Assignment: Students read and comment on article on dental hygiene processes in India.
  • Remind students to bring laptop to class on Tuesday (they’ll use their laptop at the end of class – those without laptops can use classroom machines).

Class Period 2 – Setting the Stage, Part II (Tuesday, 9/18)

  • Pin dental hygiene process ethnography “reports” to board in class.
  • Students peruse each other’s reports.
  • Class discussion:
  • What are some differences you noticed amongst the reports?
  • Did you identify any key needs by looking at the pictures?
  • Pick one other person’s process, and spend 5 minutes “redesigning” it to save them time during the day.
  • Example of functional decomp (can opener example)
  • Students given patent from electric toothbrush as a handout.
  • Class activity. Come up with all the functions associated with an electrical toothbrush.
  • Students work in teams to build a block diagram of the functions/sub-functions and how they are related to each other.
  • Come up with the parts of the electric toothbrush, and map the parts to the functions.
  • Regroup and discuss functional decomposition.
  • Provide students with a list of resources on campus through which they can access SolidWorks. Also encourage students to request access to SolidWorks via FSE license. (this is to prep for class four of product archaeology)
  • Discussion on delivering effective oral presentations – 30 min
  • Design self-efficacy assessment completed by students. This is a brief survey (10 minutes or less) that students should take in class – they can use their laptops or classroom machines.

Class Period 3 –Manufacturing Discussion (Thursday, 9/20)

  • Team discussion (think – pair – share) – 10 minutes
  • What are some attributes of an artifact that might influence the process that was used to manufacture it?
  • Record student ideas on chalkboard or document camera
  • Discussion of some important attributes (borrowed from Ashby’s materials) – 20 minutes
  • Artifact shape (we provide some shape “categories”
  • Lot size -- how many do we plan on making? Because of tooling/set-up costs, some processes are only economically feasible when we make a lot (or a little)
  • What’s it made out of?
  • How big is it (we can measure this in mass)?
  • What is the thickness of the thinnest wall on the artifact? How about the thickest?
  • How importance is it that dimensions are met? When is it typically most important that dimensions are met?
  • If a part is in motion or fits with another part in motion
  • Interchangeable parts, etc.
  • How would they expect tolerance to be related to cost?
  • Surface smoothness
  • Class activity: practice with the attributes – 20 minutes
  • Faculty bring in stuff from home/offices (I’ve brought toys, kitchen utensils, tools, etc. for this in the past), and put on team tables. Students spend 15 minutes or so writing down (in EGR notebook) the key attributes of those items that would have influenced how they were manufactured.
  • Students also likely have interesting items in their backpack (e.g., a mechanical pencil).
  • Each team reports out about one of the artifacts from their table.
  • Hand out dental floss containers. Students then work in team to ID the parts of the dental floss containers, take them apart, and document attributes of those parts. Instruct them to pay attention to how it fits together – 30 minutes
  • Create functional decomposition of dental floss
  • Discussion of disassembly. What did they find? How do they think the parts are assembled together?
  • Warn them that they will need to submit drawings as the next practice assignment.
  • Very brief introduction to key manufacturing processes related to dental floss holder –
  • Injection molding -- case
  • Stamping -- cutting clip
  • Extrusion (filament) – floss itself
  • Thermoforming -- packaging
  • Competency assignment: manufacturing presentations
  • Practice Assignment: students do an assembly drawing (by hand) of the dental floss container.
  • Practice Assignment: students describe manufacturing attributes of items in their house.

Class Period 4 – SolidWorks + Redesign Dental Process (Tuesday, 9/25)

  • Introduce SolidWorks as a tool that builds on the drawing they’ve already done.
  • CAD is a tool
  • They’ve done sketching in class
  • This is a way to do drawing on the computer
  • Takes drawing to a more refined level. Can account for materials, wall thicknesses, etc., and can produce a drawing that can be handed off for manufacturing.
  • Students play around with SolidWorks
  • Pull apart and put things together on an assembly model
  • Compare the assembly drawing done by a professional (Trian) to the one they did by hand.
  • Rotate one part model around and look at it from different angles
  • Remind them to get access for SW on their own machines (prep for angry birds project)
  • Class activity: Redesign the dental hygiene experience, 1 hour
  • Students follow a design process to develop a quick prototype for an idea to improve someone’s dental hygiene process
  • The activity will be administered primarily as a class handout, which students will submit as a practice assignment at the end of class
  • Supplies needed: basic office supplies
  • Competency Assignment 5 (design process application, try #2) given today

Class Period 5–Supply Chains and Teaming (Thursday, 9/27)

  • Introduce supply chains –20 minutes, with student discussion and report out activities
  • 15 minutes: Students work in teams of two to consider and sketch how resources (money, goods, info, etc.) flow through the supply chain for the dental floss industry. Previously, students considered the stakeholders – this brings together the things that flow between those stakeholders.
  • 15 minutes: students inspect each other’s supply chain drawings, and the class agrees on a general dental floss industry supply chain model
  • Discussion point: how does going global influence things? 10-15 minutes
  • What considerations come into play when we go global?
  • labor costs, tariffs, exchange rate, international transportation, added time for product delivery, how many vendors do you want to manage (fewer is easier, but can be less reliable), establish a presence in foreign markets
  • Environmental footprint of the supply chain is heavily influenced by global transportation mechanisms (source: ‘Greening’ Transportation in the Supply Chain, The Magazine, MIT Sloan M anagement, By Susan L. Golicic, Courtney N. Boerstler and Lisa M. Ellram, January 1, 2010:
  • Supply chains need to be responsive (e.g., not stock a lot of inventory)
  • So, they need to make frequent, smaller shipments, and they need to make them fast (e.g., not by boat)
  • Emissions from airfreight are 600 times higher than those from rail or ocean
  • Important problem to tackle in supply chain networks moving forward
  • Final take-home points:
  • Supply chains are complex systems, especially with globalization
  • The interests of different stakeholders within the system are not the same
  • What is optimal for one stakeholder is not the same for the others
  • Lots of areas for improvements and innovations moving forward
  • 30- 45 minutes -- teaming discussion
  • Importance of teaming
  • Common teaming “problem teammates” (from Bob G.)
  • Teaming behaviors model – give students a handout
  • PA 12 assigned –Teaming Activity Prep Work

Class Period 6 –Manufacturing Presentations + TeamingActivity (Tuesday, 10/2)

  • Manufacturing presentations – 75 minutes
  • Teaming activity – 30 minutes
  • Students assess their own teaming behaviors – 10 minutes