First Day, First Project: Bottle Opener
"What is engineering?", asked Professor Banzaert on the first day of class. Voices of my classmates responded: "using science to solve real life problems", "applying science to real world situations", "solving physical life problems!" We had an array of answers, varieties of the definition of engineering. Engineering is "the application of science to serve society", its definition serving as an opener to our first day.We moved through the explanation of the engineering process: define the problem, develop concepts, system-level design, detail design, and testing & refinement. A stack of white printer paper sat in the middle of the large table, to be passed out in large chunks afterwards. Our very first activity, "developing concepts", consisted of designing multiple sketches of ideas to keep people safe on snow days. Banzaert showed us a graph of the trend of ideas we would come up with: the majority of boring ideas, the steep, long pit of crazy ideas, and the shining, occasional spikes of excellent ideas that will eventually pop up.
Our activity in class was practice for step number one in our first project: to produce sketches for a 2D bottle opener made from Delrin and a laser cutter. Our problem is already defined: what can we design from a 2D sheet of Delrin that can open a regular bottle of Pepsi? As we draw our sketches, in what ways can we create the design so that it will work? We were given the analogy and analysis of a cantilever as advice, keeping in mind that we would want our deflection = FL^3/3EI to be small.
My partner Olivia and I came up with a set of unique sketches below. As I was drawing my sketches, I couldn't help but give them names as well. It made the sketches more memorable and fun as I came up with them, and made me excited to share my ideas as strange as they seem.
I like that you discussed the answers to "What is engineering?" since I joined the class late, I was not present when this activity was done, but It sounds like a great way to start off. I like the sketches you came up with! I can see that in some of them you thought a lot more about aesthetic than in others. I think that the balance between functionality and aesthetic is one of the questions that Engineering or industrial design also seeks to answer.
ReplyDelete