An Interesting Class - Living Statues

9/25/09

This day's class was an interesting one. Not a lot of notes but more of an example of conceptual design and its relationship to customer requirements. Customers usually give their requirement in an intangible form that cannot be readily measured or quantified. A good designer can translate these requirements to a more measurable form and can alter properties, size weight, manufacturing process, or aesthetics to match the customers needs.

The example used in today's class draws on the idea of the customers linguistic nature to use words that are immeasurable quantitatively, that to be translated by engineers to match what they want.


Find out more about the game after the jump:

A Design Approach (QFD)

Quality Function Deployment transforms customer needs into engineering characteristics for a product or service.

Quality Function Deployment is created to help designer hone in on the characteristics of a new or existing products. This is  is from the viewpoints of market segments, coorporate or technology -development needs.
The House of Quality (HOQ) is one of the aspects of QFD and can be complex in nature but will allow designer to more accurately weigh risks of engineering characteristics vs customer requirements.

Mini Project 1

First mini project of the semester....

Mini.Project 1: Making solar energy economical  

Description
As a source of energy, nothing matches the sun. It out-powers anything that human technology could
ever produce. Only a small fraction of the sun’s power output strikes the Earth, but even that provides
10,000 times as much as all the commercial energy that humans use on the planet. However, while there
is adequate solar energy available, there are numerous technical and economic hurdles to making it
viable as a reliable and sustainable energy source.

Task

Your task is to identify a technical, economic, social, environmental, or other design problem related to
this grand challenge. This will take substantial research, dialogue, and thinking. Your report needs to
include the following:

Solar Power Freeways

The sun is giant ball of energy. In reference to the earth is giant ball of solar energy. Solar power is the utilization of the sun's natural energy as a source of electricity. It uses the solar energy from the sun and converts into electricity via photovoltaic cells which are usually made out of silicon.

Capturing this energy has been around for some time. Newer uses are developed often but few are implemented due to the high cost of material and manufacturing. None the less company's engineers, scientist are looking for more efficient ways to continue use of solar energy.