Engineering for Industrial Designers and Inventors

Chapter 1. Design!

I have designed dozens of commercialized products and systems during my career, and none have started with an equation. They more often start with a walk. This initial reflection is followed by sketches, conversation, and a simple model until finally a design concept is developed. Upon this ascendant design, the rich technical apparatus of engineering and computers can be brought to bear.

Designers create order out of chaos, but design is not science—we need more than science in our quest to manipulate our environment. The goal of this book is to develop the “gut feel” and robust conceptual theory that can be drawn into the design process. The creative process of design is moderated by the physical and life sciences, but you can’t do mathematical modeling and computer simulation during brainstorming sessions.

Designers also appeal to more than the technical and mechanistic. We recognize that people surround themselves with beauty, whether the sparkle of a diamond or a poster of the Eiffel Tower. Functional sculpture can arise from the gifted and informed hands of the designer, but designing without a grasp of engineering fundamentals is like digging a hole without a shovel.

Intuition

The notion of “seeing air movement” or “feeling how a material behaves” is not a sophomoric approach to design—it is a necessary one. Design concepts can be proven or disproven by intuitive feel or simple experimentation. For example, when designing a mechanical linkage, there is no dishonor in cutting out linkages from foam and using nails as hinges to produce a model. It is fast, intuitive, and complements ideation. I have presented a modified kid’s toy to a client to illustrate a new idea and conducted tests in my driveway or garage with all sorts of assembled widgets before showing them to the boss (wow, it worked the first time I tried it at the office!).

The designs of the SR 71 Blackbird and other famous planes were headed by Kelly Johnson of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works. He designed by “seeing air” and using seat-of-the-pants approaches. I remember my first day as an 18-year-old intern where I was asked to improve the efficiency of an engine heat exchanger. I didn’t know anything about fluid dynamics or heat transfer equations but I did have a sense for how air flowed, which was all I needed to create the new design. The engineering analyses followed the design concept. Later in my career, I designed an engine starting system for use at arctic temperatures. I designed a high-torque air motor, used lots of fancy lubricants, and incorporated off-the-shelf technology like ether injection to come up with a system that worked. It was not a single product that made this work; it was a combination of product designs, systems, and control systems.

Helicopter blade material selections illustrate the need for qualitative approaches in design. As shown in Figure 1-1, they are comprised of a variety of materials. The blade is typically made by wrapping an aluminum D spar and honeycomb core in fiberglass or carbon fiber of different orientations. Upon this structure, a chromium steel erosion shield is adhered. In addition, blades can also include balancing tubes, lightning receptors, and a variety of means for inflight de-icing. Some of these materials make the blade light, some make it strong, and some contend with bird and lightning strikes. None of these amalgams would be specified in a textbook.

Figure 1-1. Blade cross section

The art of design requires us to use engineering where it is helpful and rely on the social sciences where they can guide interpretation. Design, therefore, does not derive from some big math equation or a focus group’s impractical concept. We bounce between the humanism of Cicero and the Ancients to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, which set science on the throne. Engineering has a positivistic framework where the scientific method prevails. We should recognize that design is founded on more interpretive epistemologies. We need to recognize our relationship to information so that we try to reduce the influences of our personal experiences and cultural biases from our interpretation of the information.

Design draws upon the humanist arguments such as Protagoras’ assertion that “man is the measure of all things,” and Edmund Husserl’s understanding of scientific method’s limitations and its inappropriateness for assessing human thought and actions. Besides being a philosopher, Blaise Pascal was a gifted mathematician and physicist. He opined, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” That is, we grasp truth beyond our reasoning ability. We can’t decipher the reason for the allure of a poem or work of art; they stand apart from the world of science. Art exists in design and this aspect of design is difficult to approach in a structured, positivist manner.

Designing for People

Recently, I designed a fishing boat for a Southeast Asian application based on ethnographic approaches. This endeavor was an example of industrial design where the functional and nonfunctional (mechanistic and nonmechanistic) need to blend as a coherent whole. For example, I had to recognize that fishermen trusted wood because it floats, and in the event of a sinking, this wood flotsam created their only life raft. These boats lasted “forever” and fishermen had no great interest in fashion statements. However, the boat had to do more than function—it had to appeal in many subtle ways. Appeal doesn’t mean pretty. Many products are decidedly uncute but are still appealing. While aesthetics need to be compelling, the material culture and traditions need to be incorporated into designs.

We manage our lives efficiently within our personal world view. We stitch experience and knowledge to make sense of the huge amount of information we receive. I was following a guided tour at the Cooper Hewitt museum recently. The guide was young. In the audience was a well-dressed lady holding a clipboard. I put this data together to surmise that the guide was being assessed by her employer. If the guide were older and I saw a young person in the audience, informally dressed and holding a spiral notebook, I would have a different conclusion. You may note that a person wearing a hard hat and safety vest (perhaps coupled with a white van) can go anywhere and do anything.

Pursuing nontechnical aspects of design requires ethnography, the scientific study of people. Ethnography is a powerful tool for all designers of wonderful things, and this is addressed in Chapter 2.

Design Process

Declaring a process by which things are designed is impossible. Many organizations have carefully considered processes they find very helpful and visualization tools exist to support idea creation (ideation). However, these approaches and tools change with time. In contrast to the ephemeral, idealized design process and tools, a helpful theoretical construct for the design process lies in part with the notion of bounded rationality. This concept asserts decisions need to be made with partial, sometimes fragmentary information, where feedback is achieved only in the future. Therefore, value has to be attributed to the decisions immediately. This theory further recognizes that not all alternatives are considered before a decision is proffered. Heidegger’s form of the dialectic in which you continually re-ask the same question is consistent with the argument that in contending with the concept of bounded rationality you must replace the optimum with the sufficient. However, engineering theory offers an immutable foundation for the bounded rationality required in design.

The creative design process requires rapid distillation of numerous ideas and this process can fail to consider good design concepts. Most notably, a designer is required to use good judgment and be confident in the results. For most businesses, it is impractical to develop a thousand design ideas, convene a thousand focus groups, and proceed with the “best” design that derives from this expensive and time-consuming process. Rather, the designer is encumbered by the fact that the target user does not necessarily know what he or she specifically wants, even though they are usually sure as to what they do not want. In this respect, design is not fully rational and the notion of bounded rationality provides a good construct for understanding how ambiguity must be tolerated in the design process.

Design by Building

Socrates opined that a life not examined is not worth living. The importance of reflection is highlighted by the educational theorist David Kolb’s description of experiential learning. The Kolb model presents an amalgam of perception and processing. This model suggests that deep learning derives from moving through four waypoints: feeling, watching, thinking, and doing. Cycling through these waypoints, where the doing informs the thinking, highlights the benefit of experiential learning, especially when personal reflection arises during the course of the learning process. Experimenting and making mistakes allows you to develop tacit knowledge—knowledge that might be captured in “rules of thumb” or “mistakes made.” This book only provides part of the mechanical arts. You need to leave the textbook page and CAD program, then build stuff, and make mistakes from which you can learn.

Buckminster Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, said that her father based everything on experience. “I believe inherently Bucky’s concept of mind has, at its base, mind processing through experience… his fingertips were his antennas to experience. No idea that he processed in his mind was ever processed without that link to experience.” Designing by building can have various outcomes, from the successes of Fuller to the lesser success of the Bent Pyramid of Snefru (Figure 1-2), in which case the builders recognized they couldn’t maintain such a steep angle for the pyramid as they originally envisioned.

Figure 1-2. Bent Pyramid of Snefru

While designers are striving for some goal, they must often allow the changes motivated by the physical building process. This playfulness with design allows the visceral to mix with the abstract, the hands and mind working in concert to achieve something unplanned. When Leonardo applied his fifth glaze of paint on the Mona Lisa, did he anticipate the results of his twentieth glaze? Did Fuller realize how his cut and bent paper would end up as a dome? Building is a design tool with a human hand and eye.

The “Design Thinking” Process

“Design thinking” is a method for addressing complex problems that are difficult to define. These can be a product (e.g., a nail clipper for an 8-year-old Norwegian girl) or systemic (e.g., how to educate high school students). Design thinking promotes the rapid analysis and synthesis of ideas. This process strives to find insights and patterns into high order, poorly defined problems with obscure relationships.

The procedure cycles through a series of steps: (1) empathy, (2) problem definition, (3) ideation, (4) prototyping, and (5) testing.

In other words:

1. Learn about the users and other stakeholders

2. Gain user insight, their point of view

3. Brainstorm ideas

4. Take the best ideas and make them tangible by building models

5. Actually try things out, don’t just talk about them

This process draws upon ethnographic techniques to gain insights into the stakeholder’s point of view. This process recognizes the social nature of design—we want to either use a design with other people or display it publicly. I have conducted design thinking practice sessions in which the ethnographic component is simply interviewing a person who has unique knowledge about something. For example, we have designed a storage bag for a specific car model and a food dish for a Hari Raya celebration. We cycle through the process of learning about the stakeholders’ point of view, sketch ideas, and then use fabric, paper, tape, and markers to prototype something.

In practice sessions, we normally depict the problem as a sequence of drawings, called a storyboard, as shown in Figure 1-3. This is like a comic strip that shows how something is used step by step. We also use experience maps that are more freeform but capture the time-related experience with some object or process. We then try to identify specific pain points in the experience and agree with the interviewee on the root problem. Next, we develop sketches that address the agreed-upon problem. Finally, we draw a new experience map or storyboard with the improved idea prior to prototyping and testing the idea. Most problems don’t have a single stakeholder and broader ethnographic techniques are required. Moreover, the feedback loop is more cumbersome than dealing with a single representative user.

Figure 1-3. An example of a storyboard (image courtesy of Elizabeth Snedeker)

Battle with the Virtual World

I struggle to unglue myself from the virtual world. Recently, I wanted to make a didgeridoo after being impressed by both the sight and sound of this bamboo-based instrument at a local music store. This looks pretty simple, I thought. I could take some three-inch PVC pipe and quickly create this instrument. I was off with my kids to my workshop where I could have fun making this thing. The joy of discovery and the disappointment of failure have always been mixed for me during these endeavors. But before starting this project, I first turned on my computer, which seems to lower my blood pressure for some inexplicable reason. After doing the compulsory email, news, and weather checks, I went to YouTube. With a few key clicks, I looked up didgeridoos. The Internet was awash in my idea of making didgeridoos. I guess I wasn’t the first one to think of a homemade didgeridoo made out of pipe. I watched a couple of “how to” videos. Then I became visually saturated with didgeridoo making and moved on to another part of my cyber world quest, the notion of actually making a didgeridoo abandoned. I had seen how they were made by others, how they sounded, and was placated by this visceral journey—typing is so much easier than actually working with pipe, torches, and tools.

The joy of discovery, the venturing into the unknown—this is what I like. Socrates did too, saying “wisdom begins in wonder.” Neil Armstrong agreed, saying, “mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man’s desire to understand.” Yet the Internet makes discovery and understanding so easy that now I would rather type in keywords than actually hunt down my quarry. It seems sad that discovery has become passé. Why not Google it and move on?

Can artificial intelligence kill aesthetic exploration, where suggested videos, music, and the like are accepted as wiser than serendipitous wanderings and bold experimentations? In like manner, embedded engineering analysis in parametric modeling and default fillet radii seem to take more and more from human decision making. We start trusting algorithms and they start guiding us, thereby reinforcing their effectiveness.

The virtual world has invaded other areas of fun, adventure, and exploration. I recently hosted a kite-propelled boat race in which students were asked to build a boat from scratch that could carry one person and be propelled by a kite. In the face of computer games, this activity didn’t have a chance. So my workshop, with refreshments awaiting and fun to be had, was empty except for three diehards, who left quickly and quietly to the world of the virtual where fantastic kingdoms and raging videos are finger movements away. Why build a floating hunk of garbage that probably won’t look good and perform even worse? Of course the answer is that it satiates a human need to explore, build, and trust that which we built. To make mistakes, cut fingers, and flop down into a frayed chair in frustration from a failed idea. To work through problems and deal with things we can touch and drop on our foot. Someone has to make content for the virtual world. Who is left?

However, all is not so glum. I had eight students participate in our kite-driven boat race and almost everyone got joyously wet and cold.

The Blank Sheet of Paper

Every professional designer’s joy and fear is a blank sheet of paper.

Ideation in a classroom studio is good fun as your mind gets to fly about and a surging rush of creation can be felt in the throat. However, in professional practice, you feel this surging rush in your gut also. You realize how arbitrary the whole process is. A small, whimsical thought can lead a team down a hallway of design that cannot easily be reversed. You worry about what you have not thought about. Is yours the “great idea” or are you going to miss your mark and come up with something stupid? You realize that the initial surge of ideas will lead to a concept that many people will spend a lot of time working on.

One of my most boring designs (a natural gas fitting) has been sold for over 20 years and is still out there. I remember looking at the blank sheet of paper on my drawing board and thinking, now what? I remember one group of designers I convened to redesign a product and we could not for the life of us think of a better idea than what was already out there. I felt humbled and thought that I was missing some great insight. In contrast, one of my favorite brainstorming experiences was a night walk on a beach with a couple of colleagues where we generated a flow of great, practical inventions. Practical ideas that address a specific need and lead to commercial products are far different than blue sky designs of beautiful chairs and jazzy automobiles.

So, how do you start? How do you deal with a blank sheet of paper? Some discoveries are accidents and we should be appreciative of the burst of creation. No prescribed path was taken nor can a backstory be described.

Thou that hast giv’n so much to me,
Give one thing more, a gratefull heart:
See how Thy beggar works in Thee
By art:

George Herbert (Gratefulnesse, 1633)

Starting the Design

The notion of paper is not an antiquated, quaint homage to Leonardo da Vinci. Even experienced CAD operators who have grown up with this medium still prefer the humble paper and pencil.

A design can start with what you know. This might include the following:

1. Industry standards that may apply

2. Required dimensions (to fit people or other equipment)

While these approaches can be a noose that constrains creative exploration, if your design is for an aftermarket product that must attach to a bicycle handlebar, you must first find out the dimensions of existing handlebars. If your design is to be used by humans, you need to identify suitable dimensions. The study of human dimensions, called anthropometry, will be presented in Chapter 8.

Other established information can also help design. The design must be mechanically sufficient without holes and notches where the highest stresses might develop. Understanding the typical shape of the object people are familiar with seeing is also helpful. This visual stereotype concept will be described further in Chapter 2. Visual stereotypes should be the least constraining metric, but this concept helps you understand what people expect to see in a design. The visual stereotype can provide a helpful starting point, especially in well-established markets. However, surprise is one mark of creative design so breaking a visual stereotype can often be wise.

The human appeal of design elements such as symmetry, repetition, rhythm, balance, proportion, harmony, movement, color, and texture, are tools in your arsenal—just as color theory can aid in developing color schemes or storyboarding can force you to think through processes. You may find it helpful to think about the numerical aspects of these, such as in proportion, repetition, and composition. Consider experimenting with the “golden ratio” of 1.618 or repetitive, numerically linked ratios. The golden ratio occurs frequently in nature; for example, this is the approximate ratio of the finger bones. The golden ratio appears often and is defined as lengths or areas sized such that the ratio of short length over the long length is equal to the ratio of the long length to the sum of the two lengths. Figure 1-4 shows the two-dimensional relationship of the golden ratio in the Fibonacci spiral.

Figure 1-4. Fibonacci spiral

Fortunately, there are no specific rules for getting started and addressing the challenge of a blank sheet of paper. Design is delightfully human and you will develop your own personal methods as you experiment with various established methods of ideation and design development.

Philosophical Foundations

Design is an applied science. Reflections on the capability and limitations of science are helpful for understanding potential benefits. We can recognize that not all technical advances are orderly and founded on historical developments. In addition, science can give an incomplete picture of truth. Newton moved beyond the physics of Aristotle and was able to mathematically describe motion in a valid fashion for his context of low-speed, high-mass objects. However, his descriptions of motion were ultimately incomplete. Einstein expanded these descriptions into a “universal” truth by considering relativistic (high-speed, low-mass) effects. Newton’s data was valid, relevant, and useful but it was not fully accurate. Designers benefit by recognizing science can be blind to the broad swath of culture or even be trapped within its own mental models. Therefore science fails to provide all data and guidance for culturally appropriate designs.

The professional practice of design is complemented by interpretive approaches that fall outside the natural sciences. Not all questions are scientifically answerable and some can only be judged based on their value to the individual. Immanuel Kant is famous for identifying the distinction between the world as it actually is versus its appearance to us. We look out a window and see a flower, but what we actually see are colors, shades, and shapes. We put this sensory data in the phenomenal realm together to form the idea of a flower. There is a difference between the sensory data and the actual thing.

The two basic divisions of philosophy in connection with the scientific elements of design are associated with Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn thinks that science is constrained by paradigms and group behavior. Scientists will not abandon a theory based on a single, contrary occurrence (a falsification event). They seek (or await) a new paradigm that accommodates new data; however, they do not do so with alacrity. Popper, on the other hand, asserts that scientists quickly abandon previous theory in the face of evidence. While Popper recognized the limits of scientific exploration, he claimed that science is always testing theories, modifying them, and extending the Socratic method of inquiry by using scientific instruments.

While the challenged relationship between theory and evidence goes back at least to David Hume, who writing in 1748, asserted that no amount of evidence can support a theory because there are an infinite number of predicted outcomes. Philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend have extended this inquiry to the limits of the scientific method. They argue that the outcomes of revolutionary times in science occur when traditional mental models or paradigms are being challenged. These challenges lead to unanticipated consequences that are not guided by science alone. Examples of revolutionary epochs, such as associated with Copernicus and Einstein, arise when science is not funnelled through a paradigm. These profound advances in science are often associated with radical changes in mental models or paradigms. Once these paradigms are established, a period of “normal science” flourishes. However, science will then resist notions that are contrary to the paradigm until it is compelled to do so by escalating evidence.

While philosophers such as Paul Feyerabend and Stansilav Grof would consider the whimsy and chaos of individuals as productive and powerful agents of change, creative speculation does not negate the power of the scientific method, from the practical inventions of Thomas Edison to Richard Feynman’s march through theoretical physics. Designers often don’t have enough information to make a scientific decision. This “bounded rationality” compels designers to use abductive reasoning with its reliance upon a conclusion (a design that works!) rather than formal rules and preconditions—the ends justify the means. Designers simply throw away bad designs and keep working to get what they want.

Interpretive approaches to knowledge reign outside the “scientific method” type of science described by Popper. Interpretive views expressly note that evidence is not proof of anything, rather the evidence has to be interpreted by someone. Information is routed through the context of cultural and social experiences that are imperfectly parsed by many qualitative analyses methods. These interpretive methods, often derived ethnographically, help answer questions such as: What is strong enough? What is durable enough? What do the stakeholders really want?

All disciplines work in a social context and the intellectual ecology that they operate under motivates behaviors and opinions. We quickly identify the “rules” for our group and try to defend our group identity. While sometimes these rules are written, most are discerned by observing what happens when people break them or by how people actually behave. Violating a group’s rules as expressed by stories, traditions, and practices can disturb the intellectual ecology and cause us to be anxious about what we are doing. This anxiety can motivate us to experiment with designs aside like-minded designers or by yourself in your workshop.

Could the desire to find a philosophical opening for design be a waste of time? This overview is intended to highlight the creative impulse to explore the unknown. While the ability to stand on the shoulders of giants through education and shared information has propelled us faster than the Ancients could have imagined, there is a small space for those who wonder and experiment with their quiet whims. Designers are not entrenched in the scientific method, rather they are rooted in human creativity.

Creativity and other nontechnical issues will be discussed in Chapter 2, but as we start looking at the traditional fields of material mechanics, thermodynamics, fluid dynamics, and heat transfer, we need to recognize design looks forward to what has yet to be accomplished. The forward look of design contrasts with the old and reliable analyses that correspond to the forthcoming presentation of engineering disciplines. However, the quantification of these theories are used to analyze that which is already out of the concept stage. These engineering disciplines present concepts that guide designs. They not only look brightly forward to detailed designs, but can also glare intently backward into concept development.