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 — seven 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 four 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. 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."

4. 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
• 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 the following questions before submitting your work.

1. Looking back across all 28 sessions of Unit 2, which single skill do you think mattered most to your team's actual finished cabinet — client communication, material choice, CAD, CAM, or something else?
2. If you started this project over from Session 15, knowing what you know now, what's the one thing you'd do differently?
3. This is the last reflection of Unit 2. What's one habit from this unit — asking clarifying questions, checking a simulation before trusting it, diagnosing instead of guessing — you think you'll actually keep using?

Submit

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

Project Complete