This project technically began as an individual project where everyone in the class had to pick a simple household object to bring into class to disassemble and draw conceptual sketches of. After about a week, everyone had completely disassembled, reassembled, drawn multiple conceptual sketches and completed research on their objects. With this completed we were then instructed to, in our table groups of four people, pick one persons object to focus on for the reverse engineering project. In my group we chose to focus on a toaster manufactured by Oster, a company owned by Newell Brands commercial products and home appliances. Our task was to give a presentation to our classmates to educate them on the function, structure, manufacturing and aesthetics of our toaster. To do do this we first had to go through the reverse engineering process which has six steps. Those steps include identifying the purpose of your object, developing a hypothesis, disassembling your object, analyzing the elements of your object, preparing a report and finally redesigning your object. For this project we would not be doing the final step, a product redesign, but instead we would be providing suggestions for how our toaster could be improved.
Here is our slide show presentation:
Here is our project write up document:
In groups we were also required to create a Ghantt Chart. A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule. It lists the tasks to be performed on the vertical axis and time intervals on the horizontal axis. The width of the horizontal bars on the graph show the duration of each task.
Reverse Engineering- A strategy used to find answers to questions about an existing product that are used in the design of another product
Invention- Design work that results in something unique or novel
Innovation- Process of improving or modifying an existing product
Hypothesis- A statement that suggests a possible, unproven answer to a question
Functional Analysis- Identifying how each individual part works and how all the parts work together
Structural Analysis-Identifying how the different parts are connected
Material Analysis-Identifying what materials are used and what their properties are
Manufacturing Analysis-Identifying how the individual parts are made as well as how the overall product is made
Systems- A set of connected parts that form a complex whole Materials- The objects from which products are made
Motion- The action or process of moving or being moved
Energy- The capacity or power to do work
Information- Facts that are provided about something
Reflection
After finishing this project my group members and I all agreed that we would like to know more about our toaster. First off, we want to know more about how they are manufactured. We want to know how many manufacturing facilities there are in the U.S. and where they are located. We also want to know more about the step by step manufacturing process of the toaster and if all the parts are manufactured at one facility or if they are manufactured at different facilities and then shipped off to be assembled at one specific facility. We also want to know specifically what types of plastics and metals are used in creating a toaster because then we could use this information to figure out more sustainable and eco-friendly materials that would help improve the product. We could also then do research to come up with materials that could possibly make the toaster more durable and efficient.
The biggest constraint for my group was the lack of information online about our toaster. We assumed that this was because our toaster is very old and outdated. We concluded that Oster no longer manufactures the specific model toaster that we had but they do have similar models that are a lot newer. Due to the lack of information online we decided to reach out to Oster via email. We asked them a few basic questions that would help us better understand what materials were used when manufacturing our toaster as well as how the different components interacted with each other. After three weeks we finally heard back from Oster but their response was brief and basically gave us no useful information at all. Other than this we didn't have any other setbacks or constraints.
I believe this was a very successful first project of the year. My group worked extremely well together because of how well we were able to communicate our ideas to each other and divide the work evenly. Throughout the course of the project no one took a dominant role in the decision making or began to slack off and not contribute to our presentation which made for smooth sailing. For this reason nothing went poorly during this project for my group. One particular skill that I improved on during this project was my ability to draw conceptual sketches more accurately along engineering guidelines. I learned about the importance of accuracy, scale and incorporating lots of labels that way your work can be easily tracked by a viewer. I also greatly improved my research skills throughout this project because a lot of the information was not easy to find online so it required me to spend extensive amounts of time in and outside of the classroom searching for information on our toaster. I feel like if we were given a little bit more time on this project my group could have dug a little bit deeper into our research and potentially found out more about our toaster. A peak of this project would be the amount of freedom we got and how our teacher treated us. He treated us as if we were in a real business environment working at an engineering firm. All in all this was a fun project to begin our senior year.