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Let’s say it’s morning, and you’re getting dressed. As you put on your sneakers, a lace rips.
You could toss out the shoes, but they’re still good, apart from the broken lace. What other ideas come to mind? You could tie the two parts of the lace together. You could glue them. You could re-lace the shoe with just 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, make a perfume, write software. Engineering is part of all these tasks and more. Engineers are the people who do the work. As with most careers, they specialize. That means they focus on doing a certain kind of job. But whatever specialty they choose, all engineers take part in the same process. We call it the design process.
STEP 1
Identify a problem or a need.
Now imagine you go ice-skating on a cold winter afternoon and get a cup of hot chocolate to warm up. The drink is so hot, you have to put it down. Even so, the chocolate spills and burns your fingers. What you need is a paper cup that’s safe for hot drinks. ▶
STEP 2
Brainstorm solutions.
◀ You come up with different ideas to fix this problem. The cup could be made of foam, which does not conduct heat. Maybe the paper could be thicker to absorb more heat. Or the cup could have a sleeve, a part 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, or break down. So, that’s not a great idea. Thicker paper is not good, either — the cups would be hard to stack. A sleeve is small and can be used only as needed. This seems like a good idea, so you draw the sleeve and plan how to make it. ▶
STEP 4
Build it. Try it. Evaluate it. Improve it.
◀ A design hardly ever works on the first try. The cup sleeve might seem simple. But the size, shape, and material would have to be tried, tested, revised, and tried again.
STEP 5
Share what you’ve done.
In 1991, Jay Sorenson shared his idea for cup sleeves. Today, almost a billion are used every year. The design process is how they came to be. ▶
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.
