Withell, AJDiegel, OReay, SBartolo, P2012-02-232012-02-2320112011International Conference on Advanced Research in Virtual and Rapid Prototyping, Leiria, Portugal, 2011-09-28 - 2011-10-01, pages 539 - 544Design teams are expected to produce physical prototypes that demonstrate the working principles of their designs. These projects may involve multiple areas of technology, such as industrial design, electronics, mechanical engineering, software, and even marketing. The integration of physical, threedimensional prototypes into the new product development (NPD) process, i.e. ‘Prototype as Design’ is an effective way to evaluate form, ideas, testing function, and for optimising products for intended users. The advent of the latest additive manufacturing and CAD/CAM technologies has transformed this process into a ‘Rapid Prototype as Design’ (RPaD) methodology. This paper describes the RPaD methodology and presents a case study of student product design projects, in which RPaD was used as a key design methodology. It also presents a software ‘toolbox’ that is used as a tool to facilitate the process, and use of the toolbox is demonstrated in the case studies.NOTICE: this is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in (see Citation). The original publication is available at (see Publisher's Version)Conference ContributionOpenAccess