ALAN LI
ENGINEERING PORTFOLIO
Design in My Life
The pictures below document the some of my design thinking in my hobbies and everyday life.
Creativity
In the design of origami and papercraft, especially in the case of paper planes, the practice of iteration through creativity is not only helpful, but necessary. My current design of paper airplane is the product of hundreds of iterations and failed designs. Some changes were small; like folding the edges of the wings up, some were large; like a complete redesign, some failed spectacularly, and some were improvements, but each contributed (either through success and improvement of the design, or by failure and knowing how not to change the design) to the end result, pictured above. (bottle rocket optional)
Resourcefulness
Some of the most ingenious engineering inventions can come from laziness and resourcefulness. In the top picture, I combined an ipod shuffle with Beats headphones in order to get rid of wires, which would often get caught by random objects. The second iteration replaces the ipod shuffle with a bluetooth reciever which connects to my phone, facilitating pausing or the changing of songs. In the bottom picture, I punctured holes in some boxes of bar soap and placed it on the air conditioner in order to freshen up the room.
Aesthetics
The aesthetics of modern products are often key to their success (see Apple). But the product should not need to sacrifice functionality for form, when the two can be readily combined through some engineering design. In my sword/sheath design, the two halves of the sheath meet to hold the sword and separate when the handle of the sword is pushed down, as pictured above.