On Friday the 13th^e(!) Last December we welcomed 25 starting students in Drachten. They are from the Industrial Product Development (IPO) program of the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen. Almost all companies of the ICD deal with the design of their products that they deliver to customers. For Philips Drachten are those world-famous products such as hair trimmers, One Blades and shavers. The safari therefore started at Philips.

Lecture and tour at Philips Drachten

Beautifully designed but also thoughtfully developed for manufacturing, use, maintenance and increasingly also reuse. We call this “Design for X”. With these complex considerations of functions and requirements, companies need talent in this area. The safari started with a lecture by Inga Kartoziya, about how this development process works. The group was then led along the user test facilities, to see with their own eyes how Philips researches and monitors the customer journey of its users. Then a visit took place to the robotized production of the Oneblades. This clearly showed the impact of such a mechanized production line vs product design.

In the afternoon attention will be paid to Business a-to-Business systems

In the afternoon the focus was on companies that develop business-to-business systems. Martin Favot (R&D manager Whisper power) presented an overview of the range development of their products, partly made in-house, partly also purchased from third parties. Martijn indicated how design, styling and colour scheme can create their own visual story about the use of products and should provide their own brand identity for the “Tesla products from Whisper Power. Also Teun Bartelds by Demcon Groningen gave a “peek behind the scenes” when it comes to the development of high-tech production systems. Precisely to get a different view on manufacturing, there was also a visit to the Whisper Power factory where the assembly of various (customer-specific) units takes place in a station-by-station setting. This places completely different demands on the product design of mechanized assembly.

We hope that the students have had a good overview of how important their field is in the high tech industry and that we will see them again in 2 years for their graduation assignments. Enough to do in this field in the near north. We can use all the brainpower to continue to deliver top performances!!