Soren Sabet Sarvestany

         For one activity in my engineerign design course, we were required to bring in consumer electromechanical products that we could tear down in order to anaylze the design decisions of the designers. A copy of the notes I made can be found here.  This teardown occured before I had had any exposure to the concept of a design process,  but now that I look back, I can see that the designers would have followed a process very similar to my own when designing this hand blender.

Reflections

         This was an valuable experience for me, because it was the first time I tried to reverse engineer someone else's design process. I had to deduce the design decisions that the designers had made, and in doing so, I learned that no design can be perfect. This was a hand blender, yet in my opinion it was too heavy to be used comfortably with one hand. When my partner and disassembled the hand blender, we saw that the majority of the weight was concentrated in the motor. From this, we were able to deduce that one design deceision that had been made for this product was balancing mass with performance. In making a hand blender, the requirement that it had to be portable constrained the designers choice of motors, as more powerful motors are heavier. However, the usability of the product would be negatively affected as motor power decreased. Design decisions such as these affect the success or failure of designs, and these decisions can only be made through the careful judgement of the designer. This judgement can only be developed through experience, and thus I believe that as I complete more design projects, my judgement develops accordingly. 02/12/2013 - 12:29 PM

All pictures taken by author