ESC101 Praxis Conceptual Design Project
In ESC101, our group - Rashad, Hussein, Rahman, and I - tackled the problem of liquids splashing out when solids or liquids are poured into cooking pots.
Here's a video giving an overview of our solution.
During the project, I helped the team in the ideation process, contributed to the development, presentation, and evaluation for our four initially proposed solutions and our end product, and participated in filming and editing the above video.
From this project, I learned two skills for working effectively within a group.
Our team's main strength was effective communication within the team. During the course of our project, we always worked on the project together - Google Doc open in one window, Skype on another - so that we would be aware of each others' ideas and progress. We assigned clearly defined tasks to each member: for example, I was in charge of providing the writeup for the folding plate insert concept; however, we always kept our eyes out for each other's work. I often offered advice and constructive criticism for the other concepts in development, and helped others clarified their ideas. My teammates in return did the same for the concept I was responsible for. This proved to be a great help in polishing our ideas. For example, when we initially came up with one of our concepts, the divider, we were unsure of whether to make it as an insert for existing cooking pots, or as part of a new pot. Instead of giving sole decision power to the person in charge of the development of that concept to make the decision, we collaboratively debated on the pros and cons of each approach, pointing out areas that the developer may not have thought of, and decided on a decision the team agrees on (in this case, we decided the divider should be a part of a new pot to ensure fit). This ability to help each other in solidifying ideas is made possible by the fact that we worked and communicated as a team.
After the final presentation of the chosen designs, our team again gathered to evaluate each design according to its strengths and weaknesses relative to a reference design. The tool we chose to help us in this process is the Pugh chart. Here, I learned the importance of "Stepping back" and re-evaluating the situation to come up with better solutions. As stated in my design process page, previously, in software projects, the scope is often narrow enough that re-evaluation is not needed, as the number of possible ideas is low. However, when we collected our four ideas together, we discovered that the shortcomings of the two top designs - the divider and the sloped redesigned pot - can be reduced if they were combined. This meant spending more time and returning to the idea development stage to analyze and present the merged design, but in the end the effort proved to be useful, as we ended up with a solution that more comprehensively solved the original problem posed to us - in this case, able to prevent splashing for both solid (via the divider) and liquid (via the slope) inputs. Through this, I observed that, when the problem has many possible solutions, re-evaluation and combination/permutation of proposed solutions becomes more paramount.
I am very grateful to my teammates for being great mentors in my first engineering design course. Sometimes, through my lack of experience, I let the team down, but my team was always supportive and suggested ways for me to avoid making the same mistakes. In the end, I realized that working in this amazing group helped me to refine my group interaction skills and my design philosophy.