Wesley Heung

Objective

In the Praxis I course, we were asked to create a formal design brief to request a solution to a splartkz - an everyday annoyance.

Design process

A key aspect of the design process for this project was the selection of a single splarkz from a multitude that flood our everyday lives. In order to choose a splartkz, we were given several criteria, as well as constraints:

• Prevalance of problem

• First year Eng. Sci. solvability

• Solvable by a physical, prototypable product

• Not already solved

• A veto list (topics disallowed)

Our group would go on to have a lot of trouble selecting an appropriate topic. However, later in the course, we would learn techniques that would have been useful at this point: multiple criteria decision making techniques.

Instead of using established techniques, this project was characterized by uncontrolled expansion of candidate solutions whenever ideas emerged, followed by swathes of destruction where many of the ideas were crushed when there appeared to be too many.

Eventually, an idea emerged from the chaos. Just one single idea. Our design brief was written to address the problem of drinks not staying at an optimal temperature to drink. To write the requirements, we started with the basic needs of our solution. It would clearly need to cool drinks to, and keep them at an optimal temperature. From there, we thought about our stakeholders. What would people want in a cup? Well, it would need to hold a drink without making it toxic and be easy to operate, among many things.

We also investigated existing solutions. Finding there to be many (failed) attempts to address this problem, we incorporated fixing the shortcomings of previous designs as requirements.

In the future, I would like to improve the method of divergence and convergence of potential solutions. When adding potential solutions, those proposed should build on previous work, not be entirely new ideas. When removing potential solutions, there should be justification to show that the solution did not meet the requirements as stated. The design process will improve considerably with just these two simple adjustments.

The conclusion to this project was to pitch the design brief to our studio via a live presentation. The Powerpoint used can be seen to the left.

My Contribution

I developed the constraints and criteria for the splarktz, and also did a large portion of the proofreading and editing of the design brief document.