Hello and welcome to 2.

008x, "Fundamentals of Manufacturing

Processes."
I'm Professor John Hart from the Department of Mechanical
Engineering at MIT.
And I'm excited to lead you on this journey
over the next several weeks.
When we think about manufacturing,
we probably think about machines and factories
that produce so many things around us, from simple things,
such as LEGO bricks, to complicated electronic devices,
such as the smartphones that many of us have.
We also think about advanced materials.
This is a titanium fork that's designed for use on a camping
trip.
And titanium is lightweight and strong.
So this will be easy to carry around when you go camping.
And also we're seeing incredible advances in new processes,
such as 3D printing, that allow us to eventually customize
the things that we use to our individual bodies.
We also have to think about how manufacturing of many things
involves integration of multiple processes.
In 2.008 at MIT, our students design and manufacture
yo-yos, simple toys, but toys that
require the understanding of multiple processes
and the assembly of parts that arise
from those different processes.
And now I would like to ask for your personal definition
of manufacturing.
You may be uncertain at the moment and that's OK.
But please take out a piece of paper
and write your definition of manufacturing
in a single sentence or send yourself an email
that you can pull up later on when
we're concluding the course.
I ask this question to our students on the first day
of 2.008 at MIT.
And as you might expect, I get a variety of different answers.
But the answers all center around the idea
that manufacturing often involves
manufacturing of a lot of things, making a lot of things,
and issues such as quality and cost,
and delivering a product to a customer.
Now, my personal definition of manufacturing,
or advanced manufacturing as I like to call it these days,
is the attainment of value at scale.
And what I mean is that in order to sell something
to a customer, you need to deliver
value, whether it's a basic necessities,
such as food and water, or something advanced,
such as a new automobile or a electronic device.
In order to do that and understand the manufacturing
processes involved, you often need
to be able to produce a large scale, a large volume.
So many things that we use on a daily basis, because
of the constraints of manufacturing,
fall into this category of large scale and delivery
of important value.
Now, this might change in the future,
as we invent new materials and new processes,
particularly 3D printing that lets us think
about small volume production.
But for now, let's run with it.
And let's also ask ourselves what's
the difference between design and manufacturing?
You may have studied design already
and realize that design and manufacturing are different.
But in order to produce something for a customer,
you need to understand how to connect the two and the fact
that design and manufacturing are very interrelated.
So here's an example.
It's a segment of a video taken at IDEO, a product design
forum based in California.
And about 20 years ago, on television,
they were shown going through an exercise of redesigning
the shopping cart.
So here are the designers going through supermarkets
and asking the shoppers what they like
and what they don't like about the shopping cart.
And then they come back to their office
and they brainstorm new ideas and they prototype these ideas
quickly.
And their ideas involve flexibility in the cart.
So you can take the basket out and walk around, and leave
your cart in one place.
And ways of scanning the items that you buy, so you don't have
to wait in the checkout line very long,
as well as communicating with the store staff.
So you could, say, check on a price
or ask if they have anything more of a particular item
in the stockroom in the back.
And this process of understanding a problem,
having quick ideas and quick prototyping,
is an important part of the design process
when you're faced with a challenge.
And at the end of the episode, they unveil their prototype,
that looks quite nice and captures what they
feel to be their best ideas.
And to this day on their website,
you can find this as an example, and see these pictures
of their final prototype.
And you can see it has a lot of interesting features.
These baskets can be taken out and stacked for easy storage.
There's a communication device.
And now we might use our smartphone for this,
to call the shop staff or to scan the objects
as you go into your cart.
And this is arguably the output of a very successful
creative product design process.
But now, let's see what happened after the show.
What do they have to do to translate
this design to manufacturing?
So several years ago, I was visiting Brazil.
I was attending a research conference.
And I went to a supermarket to buy a snack.
And I found an interesting looking shopping cart.
And I did some research.
And it turns out that the shopping cart there
that the customers were using is the actual manufactured
output of that design activity.
And you can see that they look very different.
This nice looking shaped-metal cart, with plastic and metal,
had to be reduced to a plastic design
so it was more cost effectively manufactured.
But it still retains some of the important design features.
The baskets were removable and stackable.
And the cart is overall very compact and easy
to maneuver in the store.
Another interesting thing is that the carts there in Brazil
were made from recycled plastic bottles.
And that shows an example of how sustainability of materials
is very important when you consider the life
cycle of manufactured objects.
And we'll discuss that later on in 2.008x as well.
So today, we're thinking of manufacturing
in many different ways.
And I think manufacturing is exciting
because it's related to our lives in many ways.
And it's also advancing very quickly,
with automation and robotics.
And also with the true integration
of design and manufacturing.
And among many examples, we can look
to Apple and Apple's products, their notebook computers
and their smartphones.
And Apple is particularly outgoing in describing
how their understanding of manufacturing
is integral to their design process.
For example, here, when they brought out
a new version of the MacBook, they started to CNC machine
the housing from a single piece of aluminum.
And understanding the CNC machining process
and knowing what cost and what scale it required
allowed them to make a very nice looking monolithic design, that
was very rigid, for the customer.
And this integration of understanding
of true manufacturing process fundamentals,
with the capabilities that it can enable and design,
is integral to successful manufacturing of many products
today.