Overview

Google, IBM & Meta Certificates – 40% Off

One plan covers every Professional Certificate on Coursera.

By the end of this course, you will be able to transform an approved product concept into a manufacturable, reliable, and usable design. You will decompose product functions, generate and select concepts using morphological charts and Pugh matrices, anticipate failures with FMEA, and verify fit through tolerance analysis. You will then optimize your design for assembly, reliability, cost, quality, and safety using Design for X methods; apply cognitive principles such as affordances, Fitts' law, and Hick's law; and craft interactions across touch, voice, and physical controls — evaluating them with heuristic evaluation and A/B testing. What makes this course unique is its insistence on measurable design: every principle comes with quantitative targets — assembly efficiency, risk priority numbers, response-time thresholds, target sizes — so your decisions are defensible, not intuitive. A single running case study, a portable water purifier for rural communities, carries every method from function structure to field validation, alongside cases spanning medical devices, appliances, and consumer electronics. Whether you are an engineer moving toward design or a designer strengthening engineering rigor, you will finish with a complete, integrated toolchain for taking products from concept to user-ready reality.

Syllabus

Embodiment Design: From Concept to Manufacturable Layout

Transform product concepts into manufacturable designs through embodiment design. Master functional decomposition, morphological charts, and Pugh concept selection; anticipate failures with FMEA; verify fit with tolerance analysis; and pass formal design reviews. Applied step-by-step to a portable water purifier — the phase where 70–80% of lifecycle costs are committed.

Design for X (DFX)

Master Design for X (DFX) methods that embed life-cycle thinking into product design from the concept stage. Apply design for assembly, reliability, cost, quality, testing, and safety; quantify trade-offs using FMEA, HALT, and target costing; and prioritize competing DFX strategies through water purifier and medical-device case studies.

Universal Principles of Design for Engineers

Apply universal design principles grounded in cognitive science to create intuitive, error-free products. Master affordances, consistency, feedback, Fitts' Law, Hick's Law, Occam's Razor, the Pareto principle, and progressive disclosure; set measurable usability targets; and integrate all eight principles, resolving conflicts deliberately, through a portable water purifier redesign case study.

Interaction Design for Product Designers

Design how users engage with products — from physical controls to touchscreens, gestures, and voice. Explore the five dimensions of interaction design, UI versus UX, design patterns, microinteractions, and accessibility; evaluate designs using Nielsen's heuristics and A/B testing; and integrate multimodal interaction through a keychain camera case study.