[March 5] Laser Cutting, Design Process

Today we started class by laser cutting our designs! I apparently didn't save my design at home to svg., so I had to redraw it, but that took shorter than I thought. I just traced the line on top of the image. After I made everything relatively smooth, I set the hairline to 0.003 inch and color red 255. Then I saved it as svg. and transported my file to the computer connected to the laser cutter.

Oscar changed the format and clicked print. I was surprised that it's just "print" instead of some fancier word. But anyway, the cutter didn't seem to like the left up corner of the "cutting board." Some part of my carabiner almost got melted but it turned out okay.

Some parts were a lot thinner than I thought it would be. Therefore, it was really bendable at the opening, which solved my previous concern, but it would not be able to take on lots of weight. It seems like a trade-off right now but I wonder whether there would be a way to get around it.

We waited until everyone had their carabiner. Then we moved on and started to talk about the design process. Simply speaking: do things scientifically step by step. Oscar introduced us three different processes (apparently there are thousands of ways to do it, depending on time, industries, locations, etc.)

The first process was presented as below (product):

This process was from the 50s. In some situations, engineers are given a problem and are told to solve it. Oscar noted that we would probably encounter problems in each stage and have to go back and refine before we can move on. This is part of engineering.

The second process was presented as below (iteration):

This process started with identifying a problem and incorporated the process of ideation (the process of expanding ideas) and selection (the process of narrowing down ideas). At the end of the process, we would probably find some new problem and we go back into the process and solve the new problem again.

The third process is presented as below (user):

This process is only the first step in the "product" process presented earlier. Not thinking about users makes engineering process fail, so having the user in mind is very important. This process incorporated codesign, in which engineers present their design to users and ask them whether it would be useful and what else it should do and then go back into an earlier stage in the process.

Oscar also mentioned several other points during the design process.

First, support, maintenance and upgrade. Engineers should make sure that users know how to use, maintain and have access to help after they are given the designs. Otherwise, the designs could break down easily, and users would never get it fixed.

Second, business venture. This is the question of how to actually sell the products and promote the designs.

Third, environmental impact such as life-cycle analysis, disposal. This also includes that engineers should find out what is the first thing that will fail and focus on fixing that because once the first thing fails, the whole design fails no matter how perfect it is otherwise.

Last, social impact. This is to realize that engineers are changing the world and they are responsible for the purpose of their design.

The engineering process can also be presented in a circular diagram:

Good engineers agree on process, not just blindly observe and find problems. They make sure their designs are usable.

At the end of the class, Oscar showed us the inside of hard drives. It had some very smart designs, such as a set of magnet design to keep the magnetic field between the two metals. One part of the hard drive looked like old CD player. It had a head and a circular disk. The disk can spin while the head can move farther or closer to the center of the disk; that's how hard drives find documents that we are searching for. Hard drives are very delicate designs: once we open them, they are not usable any more because they need to be very clean everywhere. We played with them and I left first, permanent, and dirty fingerprints on one of the disks.

Then Oscar showed us hard drive shredding machines, which are actually pretty powerful.