Developing a DFX Course Using Structured Methodologies
Abstract As part of the curriculum for a manufacturing program at Stanford, a Ph.D.-level course covering life-cycle design (also referred to as design for “X”) issues is required to be taken by students in the program. As a Ph.D. candidate doing research in this area, the first author (Martin) was asked to develop and teach this course. This paper discusses some of the issues in creating a new course and describes the use of structured methodologies (affinity diagrams, customer surveys, benchmarking, concept generation, and concept selection) in developing the course. Our goal in this paper is threefold: 1) to give an example of the use of structured methodologies in developing a course, 2) to show a sample curriculum for a dfX course, and 3) to present a framework describing course development.