Elvis Amukamara, Mohab Ismail, Mahmoud Kalbouneh, Amr Ahmed, and Saad Abdalaziz Elvis Amukamara, Mohab Ismail, Mahmoud Kalbouneh, Amr Ahmed, and Saad Abdalaziz present their prototype of a drafting table made out of cardboard.

Class project has students thinking out of the box

Out of the box thinking helped a class of engineering students create functional, life-size furniture out of cardboard.

As their final project, the third-year students were tasked with building small-scale and full-scale prototypes in addition to designing a manufacturing process for high volume. The full-scale furniture ranged from a rocking chair and recliner to a drafting table and cabinets.

“The students designed innovative products, built a functional prototype, and then designed a manufacturing process for an assigned volume,” says professor Jill Urbanic. “The results are outstanding — I was very impressed with their solutions. It was great to see their artistic flair with the final finishing in addition to everything else they had done. Some real thought went into the details.”

The students in Dr. Urbanic’s manufacturing process design class presented their projects Dec. 5 in the Ed Lumley Centre for Engineering Innovation.

“It was a process — we continually improved our design and actually got to conduct a lot of manufacturing processes,” says Amr Ahmed, whose team created a drafting table that collapses into a study desk and is equipped with functioning drawers with knobs.

Ahmed says the team used joining, forming, cutting, drilling, and casting to create their table, which can be assembled with one tool.

View a photo gallery of team projects on the Engineering Facebook Page.

—Kristie Pearce

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