How are designs turned into products? What resources, materials and methods used and what set of activities that goes under the heading of ‘manufacturing’? This unit will introduce manufacturing as a system and will describe some of the many different ways of making products. We will illustrate how the required properties of the materials in a product influence the choice of manufacturing process used. This study unit is just one of many that can be found on LearningSpace, part of OpenLearn, a collection of open educational resources from The Open University. Published in ePub 2.0.1 format, some feature such as audio, video and linked PDF are not supported by all ePub readers.