Academic Information (Spanish):
Degree:
Product Design Engineer
Duration:
Eleven (11) semesters, one (1) Internship period included.
Delivery Mode:
On campus. Maximum workload is 19 credits (six courses) per semester .
Head of Admissions:
Mr. Juan RAMOS
E-mail: jdramos@eafit.edu.co
Product Design Engineering (PDE) is the term used to define the profession of those persons who design and develop products from the industrial production and the final user's point of view. Apart from the economical and technical performance of the products, these must be innovating, easy to attend, operate, and capable to generate a visual and an aesthetic attraction to compete successfully in the market. The aesthetic/visual/functional and engineering elements of a product as well as the requirements of the manufacturing processes, the materials, the costs, and the needs of the market and the user are related in Product Design Engineering.
Background: the program opened in 1998.
Purpose of this Program:
Product Design Engineering is the combination of different professional fields. On one hand, engineering with its scientific foundations and the knowledge it has developed from the technological point of view, and on the other hand, the social and human sciences recorded in political, cultural, and economical contexts.
This profession is consolidated from the research and the analysis of man’s needs, the generation of innovating ideas, the creative design of products as solutions for said problems, and all of this, with the contribution of the engineering sciences, the selection of manufacturing materials and processes for the effective management of business projects.
Product Design Engineering is an integrating discipline that speeds up tasks and decisions, it deepens into the technological complexities inherent to the products, it creates broader specters of innovation as it can be seen in the projects done so far by the students in the first seven semesters of the program. Calculus, Physics and Electronics principles, among others, adopted by traditional engineering are taken by Product Design Engineering through computational packets that already incorporated them by means of graphic images. Therefore, drawing in its renaissance idea, it is retaken as scientific-mathematical tool that displayed in computational surroundings; it is used for the conception, calculation, and optimization of technical devices.
Product Design Engineering is divided in four areas: Design, Production, Values and Culture, and Market area. The objects resulting from their object of study vary from house appliances, electrical ovens, electrical gas and halogen stoves, microwave ovens, food processors; Metal-mechanic products: lightning and electronic accessories, mechanical devices; Ceramic products; to Wooden products: clothes clips, wooden floors, kitchen furniture, etc.
Objectives:
- To develop and apply new fast and effective learning and teaching systems focused on the collective work, based on the scientific research and aiming to the improvement of society’s life conditions.
- To achieve the highest possible quality products and innovation with social/technological and economical pertinence, respectful of society and environment through inter-disciplinary projects.
- To disclose the results of the best achievements in academic and research projects at national and international level aimed to recognize the program and the individuals.
- To attract and keep mutual benefit relations with the productive and commercial sectors of the regions of the country.
- To support the position and good will of the university regarding its recognition for its academic quality at national and international level.
- To hire the highest professional and academic prestigious individuals for the service of the institution.
- To train professionals at the highest national and international level in the Product Design Engineering.
- To promote the acquisition and optimization of the different resources required by the department for its operative self-sufficiency.
- To establish permanent contacts, agreements and covenants with other international, national and regional institutions.
Student’s Profile:
Product Design Engineering is the area that seeks to develop skills in its students at high scientific/technical/academic and professional level for the designing of products with determined technological complexities.
The Product Design Engineering student is trained within the inter-disciplinary, with pro-active character, autonomous and at the same time, skillful, truthful, punctual In his/her commitments, rigorous in his/her analysis and condensed in her/his conclusions, who participates in the engineering and designing projects, aimed towards the search of optimal solutions to the problems. It is also sought, that she/he be an efficient conciliator and a negotiating individual, within the complex situation of the creation process, of the product management in the organization, and of the manufacturing processes and or of marketing of the same.
Graduate’s Profile:
Considering the structure of the Product Design Engineering program, the graduate will have two basic strengths:
- The capacity to make concrete a new technical device going through all the activities that are inherent to a product design process in engineering. Three aspects structure this capacity:
- Competences in the application of design methodologies, tools of conceptual design such as analysis of product functional structures, and besides, criteria to control and define the formalization of the same.
- Abilities to make formal and Physics functioning models, as well as virtual prototypes, in the whole product or part of the same. The analysis of modeled pieces through the computational tools such as mechanical simulators (Working Model, Pro E and Solid Works), finite elements (Ansys, Cosmos, etc.).
- Specific knowledge in processes of industrial manufacturing in different materials.
- The capacity to carry out management activities in the development of products in three basic fields:
- Domain of oral, written, two-dimensional, three-dimensional communication systems to generated ideas of new products, capacity to express the product’s formal features through the hand-drawing, and the capacity to concrete the formal and functional aspects by means of the use of state of the art computational tools.
- Project design management and product engineering skills, through the team work and achievement consensus between different points of view.
- Knowledge to generate business ideas and concepts from products (Technical and economical feasibility studies, business plans, etc.)