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Imagine it’s morning, and you’re getting dressed for the day. As you’re putting on your sneakers, one of the laces breaks.
You could toss out the shoes, but they’re in good shape except for the broken lace, so you think of other solutions. You could knot or glue the broken lace back together. You could re-lace the shoe using only the longer part of the lace. You try to test the ideas until you find the one that works best. Welcome to the world of engineering — using what you know to invent, design, and build things that solve problems.
THE DESIGN PROCESS
Design a car, create a perfume, write software. Engineering is part of all these tasks and more. As with most professions, engineers — the people who do the work — specialize. But whatever their specialty, all engineers engage in the same process — the design process.
STEP 1
Identify a problem or a need.
Suppose you’re ice-skating on a cold winter afternoon, and you buy a cup of hot chocolate to warm up. The drink is so hot, you quickly put it down, but it spills and burns your fingers. Now you have a need — a paper cup that is safe for hot drinks. ▶
STEP 2
Brainstorm solutions.
◀ When you think about solutions, a few ideas come to mind. The cup could be made from foam, a material that doesn’t conduct heat. It could be made of thicker paper so it absorbs more heat. The cup could have a sleeve, something that slips on and off.
STEP 3
Pick the best solution and design it.
Foam cups would pile up in landfills and take a long time to decompose, so that’s not a great idea. Thicker paper is not good, because the cups would be hard to stack. A sleeve is small and can be used only when needed. This seems like a good idea, so you sketch it and plan how to make it. ▶
STEP 4
Build it. Try it. Evaluate it. Improve it.
◀ It’s rare that a design works on the first try. Even when it seems simple, like the cup sleeve. In this case, the size, shape, and material would have to be tried, tested, revised, and tried again.
Step 5
Share what you’ve done.
Jay Sorenson shared his idea for cup sleeves in 1991 and today, almost a billion are used every year. The design process is how they were created. ▶
Kids Discover talked about the design process with engineer Charles Anoff.
KD: Please tell us about a project you’ve worked on.
Anoff: One project was a distillation tower. We created a tower to cool air so the different chemicals like oxygen and carbon dioxide condensed and formed liquids.
KD: Did you use the design process?
Anoff: Absolutely. We researched other towers, made drawings, built a model, tested it, revised it, retested it, and so on.
KD: What’s the most important part of the process?
Anoff: Revising. We test and revise and test and revise until we get it right.
KD: Isn’t that discouraging?
Anoff: Not really, because the satisfaction is so great when you get it right.
KD: I’ve heard you say that art plays a role in the design process.
Anoff: As engineers, we don’t always think about projects as art, but many end up that way. Like the Eiffel tower or the Golden Gate Bridge. The complexity, the lines, the shape. These things make a structure beautiful and pleasing to the eye. Certainly, that’s one definition of art.
