Project Overview
I spent the fall of 2021 in the class 2.009: The Product Engineering Process. The class provides students with a team-based product development experience where students work in teams of 20 to develop and build a functioning product prototype from scratch. The class has three main phases, the ideation phase, the technical review phase, and the final presentation phase. In the ideation phase, students are tasked with coming up with as many product ideas as possible and developing bench-level prototypes to test their viability. The team down selects from the hundreds of ideas proposed and picks 4 to pursue further. After another round of early stage prototypes, we choose the one idea we want to run with for the rest of the semester. Then, we build, test, and rebuild the prototype a few times before the final product launch, where we present the product to tens of thousands of people.
My Project
The product that we selected was a comfortable heating and cooling wrap that adjusts to specific temperatures and provides easy postoperative thermal therapy. Our product used a heat exchanger utilizing the Peltier effect to heat and cool a water solution that was then pumped through a flexible bandage. The user interacted with the device using a large touchscreen on the housing and temperature knob. Within the team, I was one of the two System Integrators and heavily involved with the developing the housing and fluid flow system. As System Integrator, I had just as much technical and engineering responsibility as anyone else on the team, but also I was in charge of a number of coordination and integration functions during the project. These included: coordinating weekly meetings, agendas, and goals, structuring "tasks forces" to divide work, ensuring communication through Slack was organized, facilitating communication between the various task forces, forming and maintaining the overall project schedule, spearheading the development of the product specifications, forming and maintaining a system image of the product as it is designed, and helping with the physical integration of the product subsystems. For the housing, I was in charge of CAD, fabrication, and coordination with other teams. Through the semester, we built and tested many housing designs, but ultimately settled on a welded sheet metal housing for our main prototype with the intention of injection molding it for production runs.
What I Learned
Throughout the semester, I learned a lot about engineering, communication, and leadership. The engineering challenges reinforced my ability to use fundamental design principles to solve a constrained problem the best way possible. As SI, I learned how vital good communication was to the success of the project. If different task forces weren't clear on what the other subsystems were doing, then there were bound to be issues. Making sure that everyone was up to date on the status of the project and understood what they as individuals they needed to do was another decisive factor in our success as a team. Above all else though, I learned how to effectively lead a large team to a distant and difficult goal. When we started, we had 20 students from different concentrations, different majors, and different interests and formed the group from a collection of individuals into a well-oiled team. Figuring out how to motivate people, fairly divide work, keep team morale high during late night lab sessions, and organize and entire team are lessons that shaped me from just an engineer into a confident professional leader.
I spent the fall of 2021 in the class 2.009: The Product Engineering Process. The class provides students with a team-based product development experience where students work in teams of 20 to develop and build a functioning product prototype from scratch. The class has three main phases, the ideation phase, the technical review phase, and the final presentation phase. In the ideation phase, students are tasked with coming up with as many product ideas as possible and developing bench-level prototypes to test their viability. The team down selects from the hundreds of ideas proposed and picks 4 to pursue further. After another round of early stage prototypes, we choose the one idea we want to run with for the rest of the semester. Then, we build, test, and rebuild the prototype a few times before the final product launch, where we present the product to tens of thousands of people.
My Project
The product that we selected was a comfortable heating and cooling wrap that adjusts to specific temperatures and provides easy postoperative thermal therapy. Our product used a heat exchanger utilizing the Peltier effect to heat and cool a water solution that was then pumped through a flexible bandage. The user interacted with the device using a large touchscreen on the housing and temperature knob. Within the team, I was one of the two System Integrators and heavily involved with the developing the housing and fluid flow system. As System Integrator, I had just as much technical and engineering responsibility as anyone else on the team, but also I was in charge of a number of coordination and integration functions during the project. These included: coordinating weekly meetings, agendas, and goals, structuring "tasks forces" to divide work, ensuring communication through Slack was organized, facilitating communication between the various task forces, forming and maintaining the overall project schedule, spearheading the development of the product specifications, forming and maintaining a system image of the product as it is designed, and helping with the physical integration of the product subsystems. For the housing, I was in charge of CAD, fabrication, and coordination with other teams. Through the semester, we built and tested many housing designs, but ultimately settled on a welded sheet metal housing for our main prototype with the intention of injection molding it for production runs.
What I Learned
Throughout the semester, I learned a lot about engineering, communication, and leadership. The engineering challenges reinforced my ability to use fundamental design principles to solve a constrained problem the best way possible. As SI, I learned how vital good communication was to the success of the project. If different task forces weren't clear on what the other subsystems were doing, then there were bound to be issues. Making sure that everyone was up to date on the status of the project and understood what they as individuals they needed to do was another decisive factor in our success as a team. Above all else though, I learned how to effectively lead a large team to a distant and difficult goal. When we started, we had 20 students from different concentrations, different majors, and different interests and formed the group from a collection of individuals into a well-oiled team. Figuring out how to motivate people, fairly divide work, keep team morale high during late night lab sessions, and organize and entire team are lessons that shaped me from just an engineer into a confident professional leader.
