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The Student Life an ongoing journal by Donald Lehman |
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January 31, 2004  by Don Lehman don@donald-lehman.com Get this: industrial design is starting to gain a higher profile at my college. Obviously it was always important within the school of the design, but now the engineering school is starting to put an emphasis on “a complete design process”, which thanks to the efforts of my ID professors is including industrial design students in the mix. I have been a beneficiary of this still forming partnership, working with a few different student engineering groups on projects for their classes. Notice I am saying for their classes. Since both departments are still feeling each other out, there isn’t a dedicated “ID + Engineers = Love” class just yet. For now, a couple of us IDers have resorted to working on these projects on our own time. Working with engineers can be about 10 times more frustrating. For example: One of the groups I am working in includes around 40 engineers from 4-5 different engineering disciplines. When you have 40 people, its pretty impossible for all of us to meet at the same time. We will regularly have meetings where the smaller lead design group (made up of industrial, mechanical, electrical and software engineers and then of course two industrial designers) will come to a consensus on what direction to move in and then the half of the group that doesn’t attend the meetings comes back asking all the same questions we covered and proposing new features that we crossed off our wish list a long time ago. Also, believe it or not, engineers have a whole different way of thinking. It’s true. The major thing is they always want to know all of the variables right away, even when no one is really sure what the final design will be yet. You can see the gears turning in their minds, “Ok, so if x = y and y x 10 = z, what the hell does q equal? Crap!” They freak out. Here is a conversation I had with a group of engineers who will be manufacturing one of the projects: Me: “So we are looking to mold this in some type of plastic, which we are still deciding on. We’re looking at whatever is cheapest right now.” Them: “So what kind of plastic are we using?” Me: “…umm… We’re still exploring our options and talking to suppliers...” Them: (blank looks of despair) Me: “Well… didn’t one of you say that you had a co-op at Nalgene? Maybe you could convince them to donate polycarbonate molding for a student project?” Them: “So we’re using polycarbonate?” Me: (sigh) It’s kinda funny and endearing in a way. I was joking about this with the teacher of the manufacturing class: Me: “It’s kinda funny and endearing in a way, the process you see going through their minds trying to solve for all the variables. We just started work on this project! I want to be like ‘Guys, relax you get all the answers as soon as we get to em,’ you know?” Him: “Haha. Yeah, and then you guys are all like ‘Dude it’s ok. Everything will happen on no particular timeline.’ It’s not like we have only 20 weeks or anything. Hahahaha. You design guys are funny.” Me: “Haha………. Wait…What?” Ouch. Yeah it’s true. Their over anxiety and our under anxiety actually meets in the middle to become…. regular anxiety?… I guess? Anyway, things actually get done and become a fully realized project when you work with engineers. This couldn’t come at a better time for me, because quite frankly, I’m getting sick of working on the “fake projects” that are a part of an ID curriculum. I’m not saying the teachers suck or classes suck. They have both been great. It’s more of a “I am starting to hate school and if I don’t graduate soon, I am going to go insane.” I am itching to move on. More importantly, I want to work on actual “real world” projects and the engineering department is all about actual real world projects. At the same time engineering is all like, “Yo, industrial design: make our real world stuff look sexy.” Of course when we get to working with them they find out we do more than just make stuff look sexy. They started to see the reasons behind the design decisions we were making and a trust built to where we now work on a level playing field within the group. One of the groups I am working with is even looking to me to help troubleshoot ways to realign parts of the internal mechanism so my design decisions can workout. Which of course I am happy to help with, just as long as they take care of the math part. |
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