Watch the “Wild” 2023 Final Presentations for 2.009: Product Engineering Processes by Chris Peterson SM '13

2.009: Product Engineering Processes is a capstone course in Course 2 (Mechanical Engineering) and one of the most famous courses at MIT. For my fellow FIRST alumni out there, it’s sort of like FRC, but for products. Check out the “build challenge,” which is used as a big collaboration activity early in the term and you’ll see what I mean.

From the website:

2.009, Product Design Processes, is intended to provide students with a team-based product development experience. Students will design and build working alpha prototypes of new products, learning about creativity, product design, teamwork, and working within a budget in a unifying engineering experience. The class is intended to emulate what engineers might experience in a design team at a modern product development firm. As part of a corporate innovation strategy, students will create product opportunities inspired by a very broad product theme.

This year’s theme was Wild! and the introductory animation was….truly wild.

The final project presentations are held annually in before a live audience of ~1300 designers, investors, faculty, and friends who won tickets via a lottery and pack into Kresge, MIT’s largest auditorium, with overflow rooms and a live webcast, and covered by MIT News, the Boston Globe, and other media outlets. The top teams often spin out into companies; back in 2012, blogger Chris M. led the winning Pink Team and took a leave from MIT to become the founding CEO of HelmetHub, which he blogged about here.

Here is a playlist of products that spun out of 2.009 and into the market. I remember watching Animo, below, in person with my jaw dropping to the floor.

I went with five colleagues from admissions and asked a question of the Green Team.

You can evaluate whether it was a good question by the look of surprise and horror on the face of my admissions officer colleague Julianne in the lower left there, which in an act of cyberbullying I made into an office emoji.

You can watch the entire 3 hour event here, or browse all of the videos —  including the animations and tributes to students and staff — individually here. I’ve embedded the six team presentations below. If you don’t have time to watch them, you can read a PDF “pitch deck” for each product here.