Project Researchers: Florian Caroff, Armand Didier, Wei-Ting Hsu, Charles Langlais, Gabriel Meng and Tian Tan
The Centre’s Educational Demonstrator Programme Watch it MadeTM is aimed at enthusing young people into engineering. This group project based at Cranfield during academic year 2013/2014 researched watch designs and appropriate technologies that would allow 12 year old children to produce their own high quality watch, achieved using modern manufacturing technologies.
The aim of this project was to define the designs of watches and machine technologies to enable and enthuse 12 year old children to be proud of making a quality precision engineering product, a quality watch, in a retail environment.
A literature review about watch technology and manufacturing brought the fundamental knowledge to start this project. Business aspects were carried out with market research and surveys. Dealing with children was approached by several meetings and adapted tools.
The project led to the design of a watch combining appealing design and high precision manufacturing technologies. Several prototypes were produced, demonstrating the efficiency of the developed manufacturing process. A business plan was built to turn this experience into a real business. It went through several diverse steps such as market research, customer experience investigations, health and safety issues and sales and forecasts.
This group project was sponsored by the EPSRC Centre in Ultra Precision and was supervised by Professor Paul Shore and Dr Paul Comley.
