Designing Products with E-waste

3.0 credits · Graduate

How can we use existing products to provide the foundational components for novel devices? Post-consumer product reuse should be a central and ongoing concern in the design of interactive devices. This studio-based graduate course focuses on designing novel interactive systems with re-used e-waste parts. Students will learn to dissect and analyze existing consumer products to identify and exploit macro- and micro-economic niches. They will also learn to repurpose components, to validate the mechanical performance and robustness of resulting systems, and to document designs for sharing and replicability. This course provides students with a foundation in reverse engineering the physical and electronic components of systems to design for interoperability and reuse. The course will culminate in a final project with working prototype deliverables.