Individual Reflection (Brian Zhang)

Individual Reflection

Brian Zhang

As someone who is heavily interested in design, whether it is industrial or product design, web or graphic design; I had a great interest in taking this class in spite of it being required. However, as I had taken 3 CAD-based classes in high school, the first part of the class was almost irrelevant to me, and provided little to no extensive knowledge on how to use SolidWorks beyond the basic commands. To this extent, many of the commands that I had to use later in the engineering drawings had to be looked up myself and discovered, which ended up using a lot of time allotted towards learning how to use commands rather than drawing actual parts. However, beyond that, the class actually did teach a lot of concepts not always necessarily related to design, but other things such as teamwork and time management.

Having taking Engineering 100: Design in the Real World, this was not my first experience with teams. Although the presentation we had during lecture was not terribly helpful, it did establish an atmosphere in the team that we would have to be proactive in doing the work for the project. It was not until we actually began to work on it that this became apparent. As the semester moved forward, our team would repeatedly meet last minute, occasionally meeting beforehand for a couple of the milestone assignments. As a team, we each had our own specific backgrounds and experiences—for example, having worked with CAD before, I did most of the engineering drawings, while other team members worked with machining or manufacturing. This made the division of tasks simpler, which proved to be beneficial if the entire team could not meet at one time. Furthermore, despite being good at different things, the general consensus was that each team member would be able to assist in any other aspect of the project as an extra hand in the machine shop, or another pair of eyes in doing calculations.

In terms of design and manufacturing, I learned a lot of the actual vocabulary and processes used. Even though I found an interest in design previously, it would be hard to say I knew the details of it; in essence, I was only interested in the aesthetics. However, after going through this class, I have learned the strenuous process that goes into designing something as simple as a chair or a table. Learning the specifics of bearings, bushings, and gears also increased my interest in the actual design process rather than only looking for the finished product.

One of the most important lessons learned during the duration of this course was that of time management. Aside from the usual, the difficulty not only came from being able to match schedules between team members, but also from estimating how much time we would need as a team in the machine shop. We could sign up for 2 hour time slots, so we tended to use that as a base for how much work we should do within that given time. However, more often than not, we would not be able to complete as much as we had hoped due to miscalculations, or underestimating the manufacturing processes that would be needed, and we would be required to stay longer, which would subsequently cut into time we would need to spend on other classes. Even after realizing this, it was still difficult to coordinate due to the limited number of machines and the limited number of team members available for each time slot.

Overall, the lessons learned from this course relied on the aforementioned mastery over time management. If our team's time was allocated better at the beginning of the semester, many of the troubles we encountered later on in the semester could have been avoided easily and would have left more time for improvement if needed. This could have been done through a more effective use of communication, as well as making sure everyone on the team was on the same page. However, despite all this, going through this course definitely opened my eyes more to the intricacies of design, and design as a team experience.