Design By Design

An example of good Kinematic Design. A commercially produced manual wood lathe. We look at how the design is fitted to the environment of a woodworking shop, and what characteristics to look for when trying to spot overconstraint in your own designs.

How kinematic Design can help make designs more accurate and repeatable. Constraints and Degrees of Freedom. Why having too many constraints is just as bad as having too few.

How do we record our design record as clearly as possible? How do we record it in a way that makes it easy for others to understand. Should we be writing at all?

What sort of information do we need to record during Investigation stages of a Project? How do we make sure we have all of the information to solve our problems or prove the feasibility of our product?

What sort of information do we need to record as we design a product. Who are we writing for, and what do they need to know?

As well as all of the drawings and diagrams needed to make our products, we need to record lots of other information about our designs to keep them in produciton. But we don't often get around to it. Why?

How do you run a brainstorm session to get the best out of your team? How do you prepare the team beforehand, and how do you get things going and keep them going in the session itself? And what notes should you keep?

If a team of people can come up with ideas more efficiently than a single person, how does the make up of that team influence that efficiency? How do you mix the personalities and experience to make the team work the best?

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to come up with ideas when you work with others? Brainstorming is an idea generating technique that takes advantage of this effect. How Brainstorming works and how to make it work better.

Often you can think of many different ways to solve your problems. But with complex problems you usually find that some solutions are good in one area and not in others. How do you choose which idea to develop? And who do you pick to help you?

More on the mysterious process of ideation and how techniques can speed up access to the ideas circulating in your brain.

This is where the magic happens. You have done all of the preparation, you have let your mind turn it all over, so how do you create the spark to produce a great idea.

Once you have done all of the preparation and packed your brain full of good stuff you just let your subconscious get on with idea generation. But how do you start the process? And how do you keep it going?

The parts of preparation that are specific to the new design. Working out what it has to do, mapping out the difficult parts, and what designs already exist. The ethics of tear-downs.

Most mechanical designs are transfers of ideas from one tecnology area to another. So to get better at mechanical design you need to build up a good knowledge of exsiting solutions. How designs have been solved in the past.

Inventing is a skill in itself that needs to be developed through practise. The importance of working in a supportive environment. Encouragement to just keep going.

How you build up the knowledge needed to practice as a mechanical designer. How practical skills are essential to allow you to build up a feel for engineering so you can think like a designer.

The sequence of stages we need to go through to generate ideas, and a brief description of what we need to do at each stage. How we can use this model to help us when we get stuck.

When to change your thinking approach based on how well you are doing with your problem. How human beings naturally like to work when generating new ideas.

How we use different types of thinking when we refine a design and when we come up with new ideas, and how each type interferes with the other.