A Professional Statement

Welcome to the engineering design portfolio of University of Toronto undergraduate student Harrison Wade. The previous posts in this blog provide insight into all of the design projects that I have been a part of since coming to the University. It has been my pleasure to grow as a student and as a person during this first year and a rewarding experience to be able to look back at the progress I have made as an engineer. Directly below this post is a flow chart that illustrates my personal engineering process that I have developed. It is a conglomeration of what I have been taught in lectures and methods that I have discovered to be particularly useful to myself. Below that post are the other posts detailing specific design projects.

If you look through those, I hope that you will be able to see how each project has given me a different insight into a certain aspect of engineering design, or perhaps allowed me to attempt to use my process in practice. I have discovered that I have more enthusiasm to work on an engineering design project when it reaches the prototyping stage and beyond. This enthusiasm accompanied by my past experience building and planning the construction of projects as a theatre student as allowed me to excel at prototyping and creating a detailed design. This creative aspect of myself has also aided during brainstorming processes ,where I enjoy using a personal approach of thinking of the most ridiculous solutions to the proposed problem and then discovering why those solutions work. But because of my creativity, in many other stages of the design process, I feel myself lacking enthusiasm or struggling to prepare high-level work. This personal problem can be found in my framing process as well as when I work to select a solution from a group of choices.

I hope that as I continue to grow as an engineer during my time at the University of Toronto I will be able to work on the weaker parts of my personal engineering design process and refine the areas that I already feel confident in. I hope that you enjoy looking at my design process and gaining insight into how I worked and grew when undertaking design projects this year.   

Design Process

This is a flow chart that outlines my general design process that goes into each problem I work on. It starts at identifying a problem and continues through every step that I believe is important until manufacturing of the final design. There are several self-assessment checkpoints (in green) that allow me to reflect on the quality and progress of the design at that point. At each dark blue box, I go through the steps detailed in the light blue boxes, sometimes multiple times, before continuing to the next blue box or checkpoint.

Walker add-ons

Outside of class, I'm involved in an engineering club called Tetra. The goal of Tetra is to solve engineering related accessibility problems for the elderly or the disabled. It's a great club to be able to help real people as well as practising engineering skills and design applications that we learn during class. During the course of the year I was able to work on a project that modified the walker of an elderly woman so that she would be able to carry a food tray on it safely, while maintaining the original function of the walker. It was a great project to work on because it allowed me to practice the design processes that I had been introduced to during my courses in first year, and allowed me first hand experience with stakeholder interaction. Because we were able to meet with the grandson of the user in question, we were able to ask him questions and form a better understanding to what she wanted done. It wasn't as structured as what was done in an RFP, but I believe that it made my understanding of the project much easier. Below is a photo of the walker that we were working on.

The Arthriti-cycle

After submitting the RFP for Market707, we were given the choice between about 9 selected RFPs for a design that we, as a group wanted to go forward and solve. My team selected the RFP which requested a design for an arthritis friendly bicycle handlebar system. Coming up with the design that we finally chose (a rotating handlebar to keep wrists straight and various aspects of comfort), we used many of the design processes that I had been using so far and introduced new aspects, specifically: prototyping. Above can be seen a photo of our high-fidelity prototype as it nears completion and below, our first low-fidelity prototype. I learned that there exists a range of different qualities of prototypes that can be created when solving a design solution. As shown in our low-fidelity prototype, we were only focused on demonstrating one or two key aspects of the our design - the turning capability as well as its general size. That is something that must be decided during the design process - what components are the most important and should be focused on delivering to an audience through prototype. When planning and constructing the high-fidelity prototype we were focused on creating something that was actually usable (we succeeded in that aspect) and so had to consider what types of materials we would use. I also learned that prototyping is a very extensive and long process, and in most cases you will go through a few attempts or ideas of how you are planning to build it, before realizing there is something wrong with that idea and having to come up with a completely new idea. It's a great reward however, when you're able to see a design that you created come to life though. 

Praxis II - Market707

From the first semester, we move to the second and a new project. We were given the assignment of creating a request for proposal (RFP) for a community in need in the GTA area, which would outline a problem associated with improving the quality of life for that community. This assignment really brought together all the aspects of my design process in such a manner that I was able to review them and reflect on what was and wasn't working for me. It also brought with it a new team, and with that I was able to learn from new team members. In finding a community that we wanted to work with, we looked for communities that genuinely interested us, which is something that is directly related to the quality of work that would be eventually put into the design. We chose Market707 for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it interested us and provided a good opportunity for different problems. My group continued by talking to customers at the market as well as the stall owners themselves, looking for any possible problems that would be able to be framed and eventually be solved. Once we decided on a problem using methods previously added to my design process (see previous posts) we had to write our RFP, which was a daunting and rewarding experience. Creating the RFP gave me insight into the amount of research that must be done in simply coming up with a complete problem that would be able to be solved through engineering design. It re-affirmed the importance of properly framing an engineering problem as well as the need to think creatively to solve that problem. It also introduced new aspects to me, such as the importance of finding reference designs that the solution may be able to be built from, by looking at aspects both in and outside of the field of the problem. 

First Detailed Design

Praxis I continued with another rotation of conceptual designs, with our team being given a design that helps people bring grocery bags up flights of steps. Above can be seen the proposed design that was given to us, and we were told to provide a detailed design for that - something that contains specific materials and dimensions. This part of the assignment gave me an idea of how much work is necessary in selecting the proper material and dimensions after selecting a successful design. It's not particularly difficult work, simply tedious and time-consuming. It also gave me a good understanding of the importance of referencing any research that you make during this process as you must be able to back up your reasoning for selecting a certain material over another. 

Power Bars

This project was one of the most important in my development as an engineer. Not only did it allow me to come up with a unique design process, but it also allowed me to practice design brainstorming, critical judgement, decision making, and writing conceptual design briefs. This was the second stage of the Praxis I project, where we were given a problem that was outlined by another group. We had to come up with at least 3 conceptual designs to solve that solution and ultimately select one of them. My group was given the task to design a new power bar that would allow room for extra large adapters that sometimes cover other outlets. The first thing that we did was brainstorm possible solutions, which was when I first used a technique that I still like to apply to my design process now - outside the box thinking. When I say outside the box thinking, I mean very outside the box thinking. So for this design, I proposed to the group "Why don't we make a death star out of outlets?" At first it sounds completely ridiculous, but then when we actually started talking about it, and making it more feasible, it became one of our three primary conceptual designs, (see sketch above).This project also gave me opportunity to work on selection processes, which our group used to select a final design. We used both Pugh's selection charts and a weighted decision matrix and it was my first time using both of those, though I continue to when I need to select between close-ranking designs. 

A Dish Washing Dilemma

Design Objectives:

The current problem is that hand-washing a load of dishes (after a meal undertaken by four people for example), takes too much time and energy, as well as encouraging waiting until everyone’s dishes are able to go into the sink at the same time. To solve this problem we would like to propose a design brief for a product that can replace the current hand-washing method and compete economically and time-wise with the current dishwasher.

-          The goal of the product it to effectively wash dishes while:

o   Reducing the amount of time necessary to clean the total amount of dishes (Compared to regular hand-washing)

o   Reducing the amount of work necessary to clean each individual dish. (Compared to hand-washing)

-          The product should also be able to clean an individual’s dishes quickly, so that it does not encourage waiting for a full load of dishes before cleaning.

-          The product should also be as economical as possible, something that a low-income family or university student should be able to afford. 

-          The product, if possible, should use as little water as possible in the cleaning process.

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Above is a draft of my Praxis I group's proposed design problem along with the problem's objectives. I personally feel that this part of the project, though it was key to the project as a whole, does not have much relevance in terms of my development as an engineer. It gave myself and my group opportunity to, for the first time get a chance to really go through a brainstorming process, a key element in my current design process. It also introduced us to other elements in the engineering design process such as properly framing a problem into what would later be known as an RFP. It allowed us to practice in these and other areas such as creating objectives, criteria and constraints. It gave us a great way to learn these elements - our group was told that we had "over-constrained" the problem and that it would only result in one possible solution, which was something we were able to grow on for future framing problems.

CIV Bridge Construction

This a assignment sheet from our much bigger bridge design and construction project. Looking back, there was not much change in the way that I approached this problem compared to the previous bridge problem (see here). My group and I approached it with an extremely similar mindset: find the simplest solution and then use that to accomplish the problem. However, in this project we did look slightly different possible designs. Our first choice was a simple I beam, and when I say we looked at other designs, I simply mean that we looked at variations of an I beam. In that aspect, I feel that I had not learned very much between the first CIV project and this one. But in the aspect of prototyping, I learned a lot. Because we had to construct the bridge that we were designing, we had to calculate how much of the mat-board that we should cut and how much we would be able to use to construct it. So from this project, I drew the importance of the time spent before actually building the prototype - the time spent planning the build. My group had to re-do the calculations for the dimensions of each section multiple times. This seemed to be the most important process of the project and took up the most time and effort. 

The Design of a Truss Bridge

This was the first, I think, real design problem that I was faced with in Engineering for that reason alone it is very important. Compared to the way that I now solve design problems, the Truss Bridge design is a complete embarrassment. Every group was given the same problem - to design a truss bridge that would be able to support a certain weight and span a certain width. I met with my group and we put almost no thought into what the shape of the bridge would be, or how many components it would have. We decided it was a truss bridge and so we would build it as the simplest truss bridge that we could. Perhaps there was a bit of laziness involved in that decision as well as naivety. So we drew it out and calculated the load and how much it would be able to stand and we found out that it would be able to solve the problem. We didn't think of any other designs of bridges we could have built at all. It came as a shock during presentation then, when the other groups talked about how they had "calculated the optimal bridge design" and "looked at 10 or 12 different designs before choosing this one" when we had simply stuck to the first design that we had thought of - the most simple and intuitive design. I'm not saying that's wrong, but for my first design experience, it certainly was. This opened my eyes to the possibilities and the amount of work necessary to go into any engineering design process. It made me understand the importance of considering many designs before selecting one that you have determined to solve the problem in the best way possible and the importance of brainstorming creatively and not just choosing the easiest or the most intuitive solution - something that has become very important in my personal engineering design process.

Above is a sketch of our solution for the truss bridge problem. As is easily seen, we simply connected the span with the nearest to equilateral triangles that we could.

Above is a sheet showing the types of HSS bars we eventually chose to design our truss using, as well as some of the force calculations on the side.