Notes

Final problem statement:

Design a vehicle to autonomously transport and navigate through an obstacle course with the purpose of carrying a payload, ensuring that the original conditions of the payload do not change.



Reflection

My original problem statement.

My original problem statement is “to design a vehicle with the purpose of transporting unstable medicine through extreme conditions”. The first part of my statement is too narrow, as it specifies the payload as being unstable medical goods. The second part of the statement is too broad, “extreme conditions” can be interpreted in different ways, so this statement was discussed within the group and some elements are used for coming up with the final statement.



Team problem statement/restatement process.

Our team had everyone together discussing about the objectives and constraints first, and then these identified objectives are ranked using the metrics of objectives. After considering the objectives and constraints that require the most priorities, each of our group member came up with our own problem statement. We read out everyone’s statement and discussed the positives and the negatives of each one of them. Common problems were either the statement being too broad, or too specific, such as including all the objectives and the constraints. After the discussion, we developed our first group problem statement together, then again we looked into this statement and made little changes to make it more suitable and accurate. The final statement of our group was checked and changed several times to obtain the balance in including the needs and at the same time not being too specific. Our Final statement contained the most important objectives and constraints.



What I learned about design and teamwork.

Being in a team with the people that we all first met on that day is exciting and at the same time, a little stressing, since we do not know each other that well yet. At the beginning of this design process, we did not go into much details of the actual design of our project, it was about identifying the purpose of this project, the requirements that needs to be satisfied, and knowing the constraints of the design. During this process, the problem is pulled apart and examined in detail for a better understanding of it. It was more about “why” we are designing this rather than “how” are we going to make it. We need to understand the “why” first by looking at the background of this design. Once we understand this and knows the requirements. Then with this in our mind, we think about “how” we are going to design this project. Being in a team exposes ideas of individuals to others and allow them to share and discuss their thoughts with the team. All different ideas would rise up and gets explored. During the development of problem statement, teamwork really played a big role. Different people see things form different aspects ,and react to different things differently. Each person can spot something wrong from the candidate statements. As a team then we work together to see how we can improve this and give us a great problem statement. When all team members work together, everyone contributes and benefits the team, and at the same time ourselves.