Design Team Reflection

This past semester, my design team was Group 17, and consisted of: Alex Lovallo, Nick Shaker, Dave Sheffield and Bob Urtel.

Our Approach:

To begin to attack these problems we would all sit down and speak of our knowledge of what the task at hand is. Being able to understand what each of us had our individual strengths in was very helpful to approaching the design problems and mini projects. It was a great benefit to be able to pick your own members, as all of us in the group have had previous experience working with each other before, and two of us happened to be housemates. One of the biggest ways to make sure things get done is via proper communication, and we were sure to maintain a Facebook group where we could communicate with other group members, along with emailing and cell phones.

I have had a lot of experience in leading groups, be it in my club, Engineers for a Sustainable world as Solar Project leader and vice president, or leading a team of 16 people as director of the Environmental Department. I like to make sure that the project gets done and take on the responsibility of helping direct the group where to go. For this reason, I felt that I was the main person to help organize the group's communication and direction.

Our Differences:

In any team, unity is needed for successfully completing a task, however there is also a need for different view points within this unity. This is quantified in De Bono's 6 Hats. What these 6 hats represent are the different approaches different people take. I always like to go in with the philosophy "Before you can be understood, you must understand". The 6 hats are:

1. White Hat - Focuses on facts and information, stating only what is known or needed

2. Yellow Hat - Focuses on optimism, benefits, advantages

3. Black Hat - Focuses on judgment, why it won't work, the bad news

4. Red Hat - Focuses on feelings, hunches, intuition

5. Green Hat - Focuses on creativity, possibilities, alternatives, new ideas, pushing innovation

6. Blue Hat - Focuses on management of the process, time, schedules, resources, and what hat should be used.

Having this knowledge of how our different members thinks helped use our strengths during the different tasks assigned to each mini-project. These 6 hats also help quanitify how different people think differently, explaining why people work differently in teams. There are plenty of other ways to quantify how people think, but they all amount to the same principle, and that is getting to know your team's strengths and weaknesses to create the best chemistry, and eventual product. My boss from over the summer told me that the best manager isn't one who manages, but one who gets the best work out of each individual member playing their strengths to put the best effort forward for the team.

Developing a Problem:

The hardest part of creating an effective design is developing a proper problem. Our group found this to be the hardest part, as we always didn't agree with each other on what the final problem should be. We came to this problem by developing customer requirements through discussion, and then walking away from the problem for a little bit. After this, we would all come back with our individual Engineering Specifications, and we would discuss these so we could put them into a House of Quality.

Brainstorming Sessions:

One of our favorite methods to attacking the problem with a brainstorm was the 6-3-5 method described in class. Using this method was effective for our group, as we were able to get effectively build upon our ideas, and create new ones in a short period of time.

To break down these ideas into effective solutions we used a combination of methods to do so. This involved either giving everybody in our group 5 votes to place on an idea they liked the best (gallery style voting) or by putting it into a decision matrix based upon the House of Quality.

Embodiment Design:

Once the grunt work of the brainstorming and problem development is done, we were able to take one solution and fully embody it in mini project 3. To get this done as a group, we assigned each person to do specific "design fors" (ie. Design for Assembly, reliability, environment, etc). We would then come back and compile all of this work together.

Nick Shaker and I were the main compilers of all of this information, with Nick taking most of the editing responsibilities, and I put it together with proper formatting.

Final Projects:

1. Mini Project 1 -

1. Mini Project 2 -

1. Mini Project 3 -