Having a real prototype of your own product design – small effort but big eureka moment for students

This paper presents a project-based product design course, which is the only course on product design in our curriculum. We noticed that the building of a prototype is often omitted in academic teaching. However, students benefit from building a prototype of their design. Hence, we reduced the theoretical content to give students time to design and build a prototype. To illustrate the course two student projects are shown. We want to motivate lecturers to introduce prototyping to courses, since our experience is that the benefits of building a prototype outweigh the decrease in theoretical knowledge.