Analysis of the student perception of the link between product and production system: Towards effective strategies to teach the holistic nature of product design

Product design has a huge and widespread impact on the eventual design of the related production processes, such as procurement, manufacturing, assembly, maintenance and recycling, amongst others. Understanding the full the nature of such a complex relationship is a cornerstone in the professional development of any production engineering student and practitioner. Acquiring sophisticated concepts is a long process consisting of acquiring the necessary notions and mentally structuring them through different semantic links in a consistent body of knowledge. This generates a large set of intermediate states between the novice and the expert. Phenomenography focuses on identifying and classifying these perceptions with the aim of identifying the related pattern for good learning. In particular, this phenomenographic analysis focuses on investigating the students' perception of the articulated link between the design of a product and that of the related assembly process. The study is based on courses that exploit the principles of Design for Assembly (DFA) methods to present and detail such a domain. In the first section of the paper, the aforementioned focal issue is fully characterized as a 'Threshold Concept'. The central part of the paper describes five generic levels of understanding of such a matter: from a simple mechanical use of DFAto a more sophisticated correct holistic understanding of all the implications of such a tool. The classification has been inferred through a series of informal, semi-structured interviews with the students. The characterization introduced is finally discussed with the aim of disclosing the pattern of good learning that, in turn, could provide the base for studies aimed at disclosing useful hints for the effective development of the related teaching activities.