Saturday, October 1, 2022

7 Helpful Steps To Find Ideas For Your Engineering Project

“The crux of the design process is creating a satisfactory solution to a need. The need may be to improve an existing situation or to eliminate a problem. In any case, it is what engineering is all about—using knowledge and know-how to achieve a desired outcome.”

--Lee Harris Berger, Engineers Manship… The Doing of Engineering Design

Engineering projects involve creative problem solving, and they are not hypothesis testing. Each engineering design, software application or device project should have a clear engineering goal which can fit the following model statement:

“The design and construction of a (engineered product) for (target user) to do (some useful function).”

I know coming up with an interesting and creative design or engineering project can be a difficult and daunting task. In this short blog post, I will show you an ideation process that can help you be more creative!

First Step: Design Problem Must Be Defined

Firstly, take a step back and make sure you have a clear understanding of the problem. You need to be able to empathise with whatever target user you choose. It's important to put yourself in their shoes and understand what their day-to-day looks like. When you do this, you can then begin to identify what problems they may face, and therefore, better understand the design problem.

Second Step: Use An Empathy Map

One way to summarise what the user may experience, is to create an Empathy Map. This is a table divided into quadrants, with each section labelled based on what the user may think and feel, see, hear, say and do. This can then be referred back to, keeping the project focused around the user and their issue being solved.

Third Step: Time To Write Problem Statement

Using your Empathy Map, create a short Problem Statement of the exact issue you're trying to solve, clearly establishing a brief.

A good Problem Statement should include:

· What the existing problem is

· The drawbacks of the current problem

· Why the problem is so important

· How the problem impacts the target user

Fourth Step: Process of Ideation

The ideation stage is all about taking what you have produced so far and creating possible solutions. Using your problem statement as a guide, you will come up with a wide variety of ideas before finding the best possible solution for the user.

Fifth Step: Brainstorming for feasible idea

Write your problem statement in the middle of the page and start recording ideas for possible solutions. Remember, when brainstorming always go for quantity. Don't be afraid to write down outlandish and bizarre ideas, as the goal of this brainstorming session is to generate as many ideas as possible to choose from.

Doing this effectively can result in a huge number of different solutions, so remember to set a time limit for this activity, making sure you remain focused on the task.

Sixth Step: Selecting ideas From List

There's a variety of different methods for filtering out bad ideas, but we will be going over the Four Categories method. As the name suggests, you sort your ideas into 4 categories;

1. Most rational,

2. Most delightful (to your user),

3. Darling (most innovative) and

4. Long shot (most unrealistic).

Using the ideas you generated on your mind map, begin sorting them into each category (you can place an idea in more than one section). Using this, you can clearly see which ideas are innovative, but still realistic enough to fit your brief.

Last Step: Take away

Selecting a project can seem intimidating, but pick something that you find interesting and innovative, while still being realistic and able to fulfil the brief.