Wesley Heung

Objective

The objective of this project was to apply an engineering design process to the given design brief. There were two deliverables: a conceptual design report and a Kickstarter package. Finally, we participated in a critical design review with competing designs.

Design process

An important distinction in this design process was the ability we had to redefine the design brief itself. We first considered what the stakeholders wanted, then we considered what was feasible. From these requirements, a new design brief was created (see pictures on left).

Another key difference in this project was the feedback. Because feedback was given on small components early and often, we were able to incorporate improvements as the project progressed.

Because we had many different concepts, there was no clear way to choose a single solution. So we made use of multiple criteria making tools, which ended up telling us that two of the designs should be combined to make use of the benefits of both. This turned into our final design.

With our final design, we developed a prototype, which was used to demonstrate our ideas and check that the idea actually worked. The use of this prototype can be seen in the Kickstarter video below.

This project required much more research than previous projects, since the solutions to the problems presented were not as obvious as previously. This entered into the conceptual phase to generate more divergent solutions. Surprisingly, it also affected the prototyping phase, since many textbooks had recommendations for designing for aesthetics, usability, or anything else you could imagine.

My Contribution

The majority of my contribution to this project was writing and editing.