Your team works for Sickness, Inc., a small, independent design firm in San Diego. You company has been hired by Rockstar Games, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto, to develop a new product for them. They have decided to use the incredible brand recognition of their software to sell related hardware products. You have been tasked to develop their first new product, a set of computer speakers that will be branded as “Official Grand Theft Auto Speakers”.

The speaker set will consist of a matched pair of desktop speakers along with a sub-woofer that will sit on the floor. Your team is responsible only for designing the desktop speaker enclosures. Since they will be almost identical, except for the controls, you only have to design one of the two speaker enclosures.

When you are done, you will present your design to the senior management and marketing department of Rockstar Games. They do not yet care about fasteners, electrical connectors, or other manufacturing details so you do not need to show these in your design. They just want to see the basic design and the separate parts that will be assembled to form the speaker assembly. They insist that it have a volume control, some way to turn the power on/off, and a bass control for the sub-woofer. They have placed no other constraints on your design but they have told you that they are primarily concerned about manufacturing costs and marketability.

Their engineering department has given you the specifications for the actual speaker that will be used in your speaker enclosure. You will find a drawing of this speaker on your flash drives. Your enclosure must accommodate this speaker element to be acceptable to Rockstar.

You are encouraged to go on the Internet to learn more about Rockstar Games and their products so that you can make sure your design is suitable for them. You are also free to browse other speaker designs to get some basic ideas. However, you must create an original speaker design and your team will be disqualified if you simply copy some other speaker design you find on the Internet.

You are also strongly advised to read the attached rules and schedule carefully so you can allocate your time appropriately. These were sent to your coach over a week ago and we expect that you have seen them before. We do not want to disqualify any teams simply because they failed to read the rules but we will be forced to do so to make the competition fair.

Good luck and have fun!!