Projects

Guitar360

Praxis II Showcase

The Praxis II Showcase presentation was the culmination of almost two months of work towards the RFP outlining the opportunity of “Designing a Method of Supporting a Guitar for the Music Therapy Centre”. Our final prototype is as presented above and is a functioning guitar stand that is operable by a single individual, adjustable to suit both standing clients and those confined to a wheelchair, and stable under accidental knocking. As a team, we reframed the opportunity to better represent the Music Therapy Centre’s staff and client interests after having met with the staff and focused on creating an elegant solution as per our team vision and engineering philosophy.

As mentioned in my introduction, due to my belief that a solution that functions is my primary design value, it was natural for me to strive for a functioning solution for our Showcase. Not only that, I feel that our solution should fulfill the opportunity at hand by satisfying stakeholder interests. To ensure the functionality and efficacy of our design, we ran through component-wise testing to reach our final design. Beyond the general writing and construction role that every team member had, I was mainly tasked with converging towards particular design concepts and solutions through the use of tools such as rating matrices, which pushed me to work out of my comfort zone by allowing me to both develop new concepts and later rate them against one another according to our requirements. Through working to narrow down our design options, this informed my philosophy in the value of stakeholder interaction as well as the consideration of the opportunity’s context throughout the entire design process. It was important to keep stakeholder interests in mind and include them in our requirements, and to continuously verify all of our actions during our design process to ensure that they aligned with our requirements. As such, this enriched my engineering philosophy in the value of verification and validation to ensure that our actions aligned with both our requirements and the stakeholder’s interests.

Click here to view more of our prototype. 

Matboard Bridge

CIV102 Bridge Project

During first semester, our final project for our civil engineering course consisted of building a bridge out of Matboard that could sustain as much vertical load as possible. The image above shows our final bridge prior to testing. This was one of the first hands-on projects involving physical construction in first-year engineering and required the optimization of our design particularly in terms of shape. Since this optimization was only for maximum carried load, this meant that tools commonly used in Praxis (such as Pugh charts and ratings matrices) were not necessarily relevant most of the time. Instead, designing to optimize the stiffness and strength of our bridge made me consider the value of completing multiple iterations, representing our design concepts on paper, and how the design would affect the building process. At first, we began by considering designs suggested by Teaching Assistants and making slight modifications to those ideas, keeping the build process in mind (we did not design many overlapping layers for the legs of the bridge to minimize the need for contact cement). While designing, we communicated by sketching different views of the bridge as well. We then calculated the failure loads for three separate designs, and later focused on the one that sustained the highest loads, after which we ran through multiple iterations, making small changes to reach the optimal design. This process made me realize need for representation of concepts as a method of mutual understanding within a group, as well as a way to quickly visualize whether or not designs made sense.