Design Project 4: "Power in Community"
In Project Four, students are in an engineering design team that focuses on a real-world issue that a client in the community faces. Our team is required to come up with a solution that makes the client’s daily living better.
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Our client is an artist and has several conditions which affect her fine motor skills, making it difficult and uncomfortable to hold thin paintbrushes. This is the area our team decided to focus on for this project. Our goal is to design a device that will allow the client to paint fine details without compromising comfort.
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Our final device can be seen below. It is a paintbrush with a wide handle and replaceable magnetic fine tips.
Working in a team of four students, we are required to:
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Frame a design problem in terms of the needs of the client, objectives, constraints, functions, and metrics.
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Follow an iterative design process of ideas generation, prototyping and testing.
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Communicate our design quickly and effectively to non-team members and use feedback for validation of our design and/or to seek new ideas to refine our design.
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Finalize our design and write a professional engineering report describing the process and outcome of our design project to a client.