Design Philosophy

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At the outset of my experience in Engineering Science, my design philosophy emphasized careful planning and optimisation through theory. Yet through my many enlightening experiences in the past few months, I've come to revise and even completely reverse my philosophy. Despite careful planning and re-checking in both Python and Matlab, rarely did code work properly on the first try. Despite a theoretical load of 3000N in the bridge project in CIV102, my first column couldn't even hold a tenth of that. Yet in the end, my finished code worked flawlessly and my third column even exceeded expectations. In between the intial attempt and the final product were numerous failed iterations, but each failure offered insight, clues as to how to design the final functional product. As my engineering projects become more and more complex, it is less and less realistic to expect everything to be functional on the first try. The process of iteration through functional prototypes will become more important.

My new design philosophy, backed up by hours of personal experience through trial and error, is to design iteratively.

See the details behind the iterative design process.

Engineers design. Graphic artists design. What's the difference?

Not only is iterative design cruicial in the development of a final, functional product, but it is what builds the ethos of an engineer. Anybody can sit in a linear algebra or fluid dynamics class, but an engineer has real world experience of what works and what doesn't. Much of this knowledge is through iteration; the failed prototypes are not true failures, but stepping stones to the final product.