Week 14 Blog Entry

 Reflection:

Today's lesson we learnt about product sketching and design specifications. Design sketching/drawing is essential in producing our chemical product as it enhances understanding, provide visual clues for possible further refinements and revisions of the product and improve communication with our clients. To prepare ourselves to draw our chemical product as part of our Activity 1, we were first tasked to draw lines, curves, circles and ellipses as it is the fundamental basics in sketching. Next, we were introduced to one point and two point perspectives where one point perspective has a single vanishing point whereas two point perspective has two vanishing points. The members perspectives drawing can be seen below:

Katrina - 1-point perspective

Katrina - 2-point perspective

Ashwati - 1-point perspective

Ashwati - 2-point perspective

Jun Lin - 1-point perspective

Jun Lin - 2-point perspective

Xin Ni - 1-point perspective

Xin Ni - 2-point perspective

For Activity 1, Xin Ni and Jun Lin were in-charge of designing our chemical product, self-watering plant system. We used 2-point perspective to better illustrate our product to the audience and to ourselves. With this sketch, we can now visually see how our self-watering plant would look like when we design it in the future. 

Activity 1: Sketching of our self-watering plant system

The next part of the lesson covered on design specifications. A specification is a set of documented requirements to be satisfied by a material, design, product, or service. It is a common preliminary part of any engineering design and product development process. Design specifications provide us with the information we need to build out new features or the functionality of our product. A good design specification helps us to answer questions such as: 'What are we building' - product name, 'What should the final build achieve?' - specification metric (or quality) and 'How do we measure success?' - quantitative value. As we are in the preliminary design stage, we focused on the material and functional specifications which aspects include: physical attributes of products, functional performance of product and others that does not affect functional performance. 

From Activity 2, Ashwati and Katrina were in-charge of customizing our design specification table which can be seen below. The quantitative values were decided upon some research and reasoning between ourselves. As this was just the preliminary stage, we would have to relook into our quantitative values again when we start designing our product for a better specification for our self-watering plant system.

Activity 2: Design specifications of our self-watering plant system

All in all, it was a fun and interesting activity as we discover some our hidden talents in drawing and it drive our creativity in sketching our perspective drawings. Additionally, this lesson is useful in helping us to design our chemical product better so that we can communicate better with our clients and improvise our product with further refinements.