Course Meeting Times
Lectures: 1 session / week, 3 hours / session
Labs: 1 session / week, 2 hours / session
Course Objective
The objective of the course is to enable students through lecture and hands-on experience designing an inlaid tile to:
- Learn Peer Review Engineering Process (PREP), based on the scientific method, to turn ideas into robust reality:
- Identification, selection, and development of ideas.
- Generation & creation of design strategies, concepts, and modules.
- Completing, documenting, and exhibiting an original design.
- Learn to think both critically and visually, and to work with different media.
- Learn solid modeling and other drawing tools, and learn to go from a computer model to a machined component using an abrasive waterjet machining center.
- Learn how to assess risk, resort to countermeasures when risk becomes too great, and manage projects to be "on-time" and "on-budget".
- Practice professionalism, be safety conscious, and maintain high ethical standards.
Course Project
The focus of this course is to learn the Peer Review Evaluation Process by creating inlaid tiles that are of deep significant meaning to the team members that create them. The homework projects will help teams of three students to design and build their tile projects whose elements are manufactured by students on an abrasive waterjet machining center from digital solid models of the tiles that the teams create. At the end of the course, the tiles will be exhibited in the student art gallery. To help students learn the tools they will use for their team project, each student will make a small project: a solid model and manufacture of an inlay created in a standard 12" marble tile that will itself be inlaid into a wooden frame the students also make.
Software Tools
We will introduce the students to a number of different solid modeling and design tools. In addition to commercial professional design tools such as SolidWorks® and CorelDRAW®, the students will be introduced to a new design environment where the objects in the design can be parameterized algorithmically. The students will be asked to provide critical feedback on the merits of our tool as compared to other tools that they will use in the course and will be invited to offer enhanced/improved design specifications for our tool based on their design experiences with all the different tools.
In addition, on-line Peer Review Evaluation Process (PREP) tools will be made available so students can evaluate each other's ideas from the comfort of any internet accessible location.