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.