Closing the Loop With Your Client

Milestone 1 started with a brief from a real or surrogate client. These two sessions close that loop — presenting what you built back to the person or team who asked for it.

This also closes all of Unit 2 — eight weeks from "what is digital manufacturing" to a real, unique cabinet built for a real client.

A team whose cabinet doesn't perfectly match their original vision, but who can clearly explain what changed and why, demonstrates the same competency as a team whose build went exactly to plan. Honest explanation matters more than a flawless outcome.

Build

Prepare a presentation or written defense — check with your instructor which format — covering all five of these:

1. How This Answers Your Client's Brief

Reference your actual Milestone 1 requirements summary. Explain, specifically, how your finished cabinet addresses the User, Need, Constraints, and Success Criteria you documented back then — not a retroactive justification that sounds better now.

2. Your Design Decisions

Explain your concept choice, your material choices, and your route-or-print decisions — and why, using your actual Milestone 2–3 reasoning, not vague preference.

3. Your CAM Decisions

Pick one panel and walk through how you programmed it: which toolpath types it needed and why, your offset choice, your step-over and step-down, and where you put tabs. Then explain one CAM decision you'd make differently now.

Fusion was the biggest new skill in this unit — this is where you show you can reason about it, not just operate it.

4. What Changed During the Build

State honestly what differed between your CAD model and your physical cabinet. For anything that changed, give a specific reason — a material behaving unexpectedly, a CAM setup issue, an assembly problem — not a vague "it needed some tweaks."

5. Your Documentation

Submit your full documentation trail: Milestone 1's requirements summary, Milestone 2's decision matrix and material choices, Milestone 3's CAM records, and Milestone 4's build log — showing the project's real evolution, not just a polished final summary.

Checkpoint

Before you present or submit, confirm:

• Your brief-alignment explanation references your actual original requirements, not a rewritten version
• Your CAM walkthrough covers a specific panel with real parameter choices — not a general description of how CAM works
• Every build change (if any) has a specific, named cause — not a vague explanation
• Your documentation is complete from Milestone 1 through today, not just a final-state summary

Reflection

Answer these on your own. Reflections are individual, even when the rest of the session was team work.

1. Your client gave you a brief back in Milestone 1. Knowing what you know now, what's the one question you wish you'd asked them then — and what would you have done differently with the answer?
2. This is the last reflection of the course. What's one habit from this class — asking clarifying questions, checking a simulation before trusting it, diagnosing instead of guessing — you think you'll actually keep using outside of it?

Submit

Submit your presentation or written defense, and your complete project documentation.

Project Complete