Engineering - saurabhr

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Skylines | Information & Interaction Design

About the Project

As a part of Tangible Interaction and Design and Learning, groups of students re-design museum exhibits leveraging technology in an effort to create a better learning experience. Our group chose to redesign the Skyline exhibit at the Chicago Children’s Museum. We used a fiducial marker based computer vision system (Topcodes) to provide visitors with live feedback as they design their structures.

Personal Impact

My main impact was designing the interaction workflow and developing the back-end shape recognition script via JavaScript. The workflow design largely consisted of determining what information to display, when to display it, and how to display it. This was done based on research about optimizing learning in museums^1, 2, 3. The backend system was developed in conjunction with a teammate. My focus was on writing the framework for shape recognition (via JavaScript) and minor contributions to the interface itself.

Tools Used

Process

Exhibit Research & Analysis

Skylines is one of Chicago Children’s Museum’s most successful exhibits. The open-ended structure of the exhibit allows visitors to really express their creativity. Additionally, visitors are exposed to tools such as screwdrivers, nuts/bolts, and large wooden beams giving them exposure in building things with their hands.

Solution

To remedy that we used a computer vision to analyze what visitors are building in real time, and give them feedback as to how their design could be improved along with real-life examples of buildings that use similar structures These design decisions were based off academic paper’s regarding tangible learning theory that we’d read throughout the quarter (e.g. Active Prolonged Engagement).

Initial Sketches

Prototype v1.0

Final Design

Outcome

A full write-up of the project can be found below

Skyline-TIDAL-Paper

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Pacific Die Cut Industries | Project Engineer

role overview

I spent the first two years out of undergrad as a Project Engineer at Pacific Die Cut Industries (PDCI) — a contract manufacturer servicing the automotive and medical industry. I started supporting engineers on medical and automotive projects and eventually became the lead engineer on medical projects.

As a Project Engineer at Pacific Die Cut Industries, I was the technical point of contact from the initial client request for quote until the client’s product was at full-scale production.

This first entailed costing out the project so the sales staff could present a quote. For larger clients, such as Stryker or Boston Scientific the focus was on developing an optimized manufacturing process based on requirements given. Conversely, with startups, I would co-develop the product with them (product drawings, material sourcing). For projects that moved forward, I would work with the production and quality assurance staff on implementing the manufacturing process. Once the process was finalized and documented, my role on the project would come to a close as production staff took on project ownership.

tools used

Process Overview

My workflow for the typical project can be described as such:

Step 1 — Review customer drawings, provide design feedback, and cost out the project

Step 2 — Work with operators to implement manufacturing process

Step 3 — After determining quality and manufacturing capabilities from pilot runs, formalize manufacturing protocol and start full-scale production

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CAD/CAM: Art to Part

How can we injection mold a toy based on a 4th grader’s sketch?

Skills

Injection Molding • CNC • Design for Manufacutirng/Assembly • CAD Modeling

Project Overview:

This project is currently in progress. I, along with 3 other students, are working designing and manufacturing a child’s toy from a 4th graders sketch. This initially entailed modeling the part. From there we created a CNC program via Nx to machine out the molds. We are currently machining out the molds to be injection molded.

Personal Responsibilities:

My main responsibility was a subassembly of the final part – this entails modeling the part and designing the corresponding mold taking account DFMA principles.

Project

Process

The project started with this beautiful sketch by Anna, Keyon and Mack — three 4th graders at a local elementary school.

Based on their drawing, we modeled the above cupcake. It has three distinct parts — the candle, the frosting & the base.

Before modeling the molds, we 3‑D printed our part to visualize and verify it.

After verifying out CAD models CNC molds were created.

Finally the parts were injection molded

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Proctor & Gamble | Packaging Design & Engineering

Project Details

Procter & Gamble has decided to pursue Intellectual Property Rights on the final project we designed. Consequently, details about the specific P&G product and the final product are under a confidentiality agreement.

Through Northwestern’s Product Design Studio Proctor & Gamble asked student groups to tackle their long-term innovation projects. Myself and 3 other Engineering Design Innovation students were tasked with designing eCommerce packaging.

process

ethnographic research

Initially, my team and I conducted in-home interviews with consumers to get a contextual understanding of their experience with P&G’s current packaging solutions. The insights gleaned from those interviews were synthesized into succinct themes from which our team teased out our initial design imperatives

initial prototyping

From there my team and I created low-fidelity prototypes that corresponded to our initial analysis of user needs. Prototypes at this juncture consisted of foam-core and cardboard to illustrate proof of concept.

User Testing

The low fidelity prototypes were shown to users to get more pointed feedback on the direction our team had taken. The user feedback was analyzed in a similar way to the first user looks, and that feedback allowed our team to define our design direction more clearly.

final design

With a more defined design direction and understanding of user needs, my team and I designed and prototyped a higher fidelity, human-centered packaging solution

outcome

Our group pitched our final design to Procter & Gamble and the company decided to pursue Intellectual Property Rights on the final project we designed.

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