Innovative teaching of product design and development in an engineering management program

Engineering Management is a discipline that is not rigidly defined and the Master Programs attract students with different undergraduate disciplines. Students are attracted towards Engineering Management only at the Masters' level and it is difficult to incorporate all topics in the Masters' curriculum. Therefore a choice has to be made. Some programs give more emphasis for Product Design and Development course while some do not and this choice is often governed by the national requirements. United Arab Emirates University places great emphasis for Product Design and Development in their Master of Engineering Management. The students are from a variety of disciplines and a novel model for teaching the design process was introduced. The model consists of (i) teaching design models, methods, approaches and outputs (ii) using the techniques taught to design and build a new product and (iii) developing a design management strategy derived from their project experience. The results were very encouraging and this paper describes them.