Where are the scissors and tape?
It was surely my early beginnings as a junior inventor that lead on to me becoming a design engineer. My interest in Sc-Fi stories and comic books inspired me to start sketching all sorts of vehicles, airplanes and space ships. It didn’t stop there. I also developed a reputation for unpacking toys and other presents and then ignoring the contents in favour of the boxes. No box was too big or too small to be turned into something else. Scissors and sticky tape were my cohorts as I created everything from laser pistols to vast dragon besieged castles. It drove my poor parents to distraction.
As I got older my projects became more targeted, more specific. I became unhappy with the mere representations of things, I wanted to actually create functioning objects. The problem was, I had no idea how to go about this. My next direction was to try and learn from those that had gone before me. If I could understand how other things functioned then I could select and duplicate the bits I needed for my own projects. This resulted in a phase in which I started taking everything apart. Toys, tricycles, hair driers, vacuum cleaners, cassette tape players, radios, televisions. Nothing was too sacred for me to not attack with a screwdriver or spanner (or occasionally hammer) in order to take it apart and study its inner workings. The problem was that I wasn’t very good at putting these things back together again. Our house slowly filled up with things that no longer functioned because their innards were now spilling out all over the floor. You may be able to imagine that, for the rest of the household, this was a most stressful stage in my development. You could never be sure if anything you put down within easy reach of ‘the boy’ would ever work again. Worse still, I never really learned very much either. The only big take away was that once in pieces, the relationship between features and behaviour became even more difficult to understand. The problem was, I simply lacked the necessary skills. I hadn’t yet acquired the analytical tools or methods needed to find the link between form and function.
This had to wait until I began my formal training as an engineer. One of the first lectures I attended at university was about Engineering Design. The lecturer explained to us that Design was the core of engineering. He went on to explain that the root of the word Engineer was not ‘engine’ it was ‘ingenious’. Engineering was all about design and design was all about invention. I was entranced. Suddenly, I had my mandate. I realised that a formal education in engineering wasn’t about stifling my creativity. It was about giving it the opportunity to expand and grow. Now instead of just pretty pictures, I could actually design REAL things! I threw myself into my studies with great energy and became fascinated by the methods and theory of engineering design.
My interest in the principles of design grew throughout my studies. My first great design project in industry was the next logical step. I didn’t end up designing a particular product, I ended up designing a method of designing any product. On the following pages, I present my Masters degree Thesis and other research papers and documents that are the result of this work.