We have five team members from ME, who are super smart and creative, and one team member from SI who is good at graphic design and user research. We plan to solve a problem in cars, although, at this point, we have not decided what exactly it is. We are in design.
Go blue! Go IEC - BREAKER!
Our Project Status (Ziwei Xie)
The landmark of this week is that we formed a team and we narrowed our topic into one problem in cars. We held group meetings on this Monday (Sep. 9th) and this Thursday (Sep. 12th). We discussed a lot about the topic. By far, we mainly have had two ideas. One is about the snow and the car as it takes quite a long time to defrost the ice and snow on the car. We all have a hard time in the cold winter wind shoveling snow on our cars, specifically Ann Arbor has such a long winter. The other idea is about reckless drivers as driving for a longtime is boring and easy to feel tried. Reckless is not safe for drivers, which is certainly a problem for most drivers. However, we researched the market and found out for both of these two topic, there are already maturely products solving them.By far, we have not decided what our problem/topic is. We decided to talk with our friends and ask them what problems bother them while driving. And then, we will have a meeting tomorrow night to choose two problems from them and finally decide our problem.
Exciting/ interesting finding (Chee Wee Lee)
First of all, I would like to mention a fun fact about our group – we are all Chinese ethnically, though some of us don’t speak Chinese language. This is really cool, considering we are from all around the world and various background. Back to our group project and discussion, we had a couple of meetings and we have gotten quite some work done. During our meetings, our discussion mainly revolved around the topic or problem that we should be focusing on in our project. It turned out that we have chosen a general topic which is related to automobile. We then narrowed down the problem statement to focusing on a certain issues – ice/snow on vehicle, reckless driver and vehicle safety. In the midst of discussion, we thought of tons of solutions to the issues we selected, which by now we should know we did wrongly, because we are supposed to come up with the issues we have, instead of the solutions. But most of were very surprised by the latest technology install in the newest vehicle. We kind of found out tons of interest stuff in vehicle by exchanging the experience we have had in our personal or friend’s vehicle, because most of us have been in different cars, ranging from a normal sedan to a luxurious premium vehicle. For instance, one of us talked about a futuristic GPS which projects onto the windshield, which is something we normally see in an action movie. It is amazing that all these unexpected technology is actually achieved in our real life. On a side note, I personally thought myself as very outdated in terms of the latest technology, and that I should update myself from time to time. Also, it was a very fun and exciting conversations I had with my team members.
Challenges (Ivan manuel gunawan)
So after doing all those brainstorming during our first meeting, we went to Prof. Brei to consult about our ideas. However, she says that we are doing the projects wrongly. We should think about the problems first, and don’t think about solution just yet. With that being said, we continue the discussion talking about our two possible problem definition, which was car and snow, or reckless driving in car especially sleepy and drunk driving. Narrowing it down to these two, she suggest us to just focus on the car and snow topic, since it seems that the solution would involve more mechanical engineering type of work, and that reckless driving problem might lead us to a more electrical field. She also adds that car companies are already doing a lot of research and solution on the reckless driving part, which leave us less room to provide new innovative ideas.Talking about our proposed solution with the linkages and automatic / portable car cover, she raised another problem saying that it was too simple to be done by a group of 5 Mechanical engineers and 1 school of information grad student. She was proposing to implement more thermodynamics solution such as blower, heater, or other stuff.
Other than that, I was also doing research on those snow car cover, and snow removal device on the internet, and found out that people already thought about a very similar concept that I had in mind, and they have actually had a physical product ready to go to the market since 3 years ago as I looked from their youtube videos.
So thinking about these challenges, we might have to come up with more innovative ideas if we want to stick with car and snow problem. Or, we might have to think about some other issues with automotive world which we also talked as a group during our meeting last Thursday, 9/12/2013. Another possible breakthrough that we can do is by thinking more critically about other issues outside automotive world. Getting ideas from the patent list I believe would also help us to generate more creative ideas and solve our current challenges.
No comments:
Post a Comment