MIT Design for Demining

Assignment 12 - Design review one

Assigned Wednesday, March 21
Due Friday, April 6, by 3:30 p.m.

Target specifications

Create lists of target specifications for areas you are working in. For example, for the clippers these areas might be the gripper, the shield and the handle construction. Use these to evaluate your more-complete ideas in each of these areas.

A target specification list gives the characteristics of a good (to great) solution. Make these characteristics as independent of a particular concept as possible. For example, "fogging" as a characteristic assumes a visor concept with a surface that can fog up.

Give each characteristic a preferred direction for improvement. Decide if more, less or a target value is best. Give each one a value with units that is where you want to get to for that characteristic. Some will be difficult to measure or will be unit-less.

Concepts

Represent your ideas as detailed gallery sketches. These sketches may combine several ideas. For example, the breath deflector sketches may combine different ideas for shape with different attachment ideas.

Preliminary choices

Evalute your concepts using your specifications and highlight your best options for going forward.

Summarize your investigations (experiments, tests, analyses, comparisons, etc) that support your choices. Include photos and charts of data if available. If you have run experiments, create a table of experiments outlining what was varied and what the outcomes were.

Be prepared to give answers to your hard questions.

Next steps

List the steps that will be taken to complete the project. Focus on making prototypes, models or experiments that that demonstrate the feasibility of the ideas well.

Presentation

Prepare a 10 minute presentation to be given in class on the due date. There will be time for about 10 minutes of Q&A and discussion after your presentation. You may use up to 4 overhead slides and as many props (prototypes, foam models, experimental outcomes, products purchased, etc.) as you have available and time will allow. You are not required to use slides, but will need to create handouts or use some other means to convey some of the information. Practice this presentation and adjust it to fit the time available.

Submission

Combine your gallery sketches, specifications, summary of investigations, and next steps into one PDF document and email it to Andrew and Ben by the due date.