A Proposed Design Process of a Customized Educational Hybrid Prototyping Machine

Designing and developing innovative products is the core competency requested today in the job market. A competent student capable of developing innovative products is a student who able to master the development process, as well as make prototypes, and thus effectively using prototyping technologies. In this perspective, many technical high schools, universities, and FabLabs need machines dedicated to the realization of prototypes such as 3D printers, CNC machines. This need is, however, arduous for implementation in the context of universities, technical colleges, and FabLabs in the developing countries due to deep-rooted local constraints, such as shortage of financial and human resources. Therefore, the design of an intelligent hybrid machine that can consolidate a maximum of features and give a wide range of prototyping possibilities, and taking into account these constraints, have to be proposed. In this paper, we present the proposed process or designing and developing the customized intelligent hybrid machine. The paper aims to emphasize the importance of using a customized design process for the development of a hybrid machine, based on the best techniques and methods of product development used by industries, such as job mapping to identify the opportunities, business model Canvas to create and capture the value offered by opportunities, Functional analysis, Kano model, Quality Function Deployment (QFD), morphological analysis, Triz, Pugh,... The eventual development of this customized hybrid machine will motivate students to work as true engineers, improve their ability to solve engineering problems and work collaboratively. It will be useful for all universities of a similar context of limited resources.