Design Process

Engineering design is an iterative process

Along the way, we make improvements and adjustments to our design until we end up with a final one we are happy with. The toy you are building now is a culmination of these effort.

Brainstorm

Every product design starts somewhere, an ours started at the MAD museum in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Upon returning from our escapade, we new we wanted you to have an interactive university open day experience, just like we had.

With that and product requirements in mind, we drew up a few initial ideas.

CAD

Stands for Computer Aided Design

Various commercial softwares are available to create 3D models on computer.

At Warwick, we mainly use Autodesk Fusion 360. However, this time around, we use SolidWorks for familiarity.

CAD allows us to visualise out design and create parts and assembly for further analysis.

Design Selection

Now that we have three basic designs, we need to choose two to carry forward for further refinement.

To help with that process, a Pugh decision matrix is drawn up. This helps us identify quantitatively which designs are better than the others.

At this stage, we have narrowed down to 2 concepts - your dragster and a desk tidy.

Prototyping

To really see which one of the two design is more feasible, we need to build it, try it and improve it.

We made adjustments to fits, tolerances (hole and shaft size), manufacturing methods and more.

To see the real issues with a design, building prototypes is essential.

To learn more about the difficulties we encountered and adjustments we made, head on over to the manufacturing page.

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