Thread: How things are designed these days

That's an interesting read Michael, and an insight into the world of engineering/design, from an "outsiders" prospective. it's in vast contrast (as you would naturally expect) to a design brief I go through when I wish to design something for myself. Admittedly there is no marketing department (although sometimes I do need to include a marketing department to "sell" the idea to the SWWMBO) and the cost is not necessarily the largest consideration. Also because I'm the project manager (is that the correct term?) I get to decide what features and level of quality are important to me! This is obviously a much more simplistic approach to what happens in industry!

Simon

I don't agree with your hypothesis Michael.

Bad design is nothing new, it's always been around us,

The automotive industry is a prime example - endless stupidity in badly designed, poorly placed, totally unsuited, almost impossible to work on design.

Bean counters have always played their part, otherwise engineers would run riot and there would be no profit.

In your list you left out "designed with end user in mind" - how often is stuff workable, but could be nicer to use, simpler, better placed.

This goes down to bar codes on packets placed under fold overs, munchie packets that are designed to be opened by left handed people (eg. Arnotts Shapes boxes) etc.

So this is nothing new as far as I see it.

Cheers

Rob

Geez Michael don't get me started!

Thinking back, when I have purchased tools/ machines in the past , it has often been an impulse buy. The new breed of tool purveyors understand me very well and accordingly gear many of the inputs into the tool that fire up my desire for ownership at the time of first contact. A lot of these tools that try to look like the more expensive tools are beginning to show up in the so called box stores,ie, Masters & Bunnings.

Packaging, form and appearance are king. Function, quality and longevity take a back seat in many cheaper end tools - not all I will grant you.

Indeed many tools are disposable, timber cutting handsaws with heat induction hardened teeth are but one example.

I almost fell for the impulse buy yet again in Masters the other day.

On display was a a pair of long jaw RH tin snips- Wiss brand but quite similar in mechanism and form to German Eyrt brand BUT on closer inspection the jaw bodies were not solid cast or drop forged but formed from a much thinner section of bar stock. The plastic hand grips were thinner and would fall to bits or slide off before much time had elapsed. The shiny bits were flash chromed would not be shiny for very long in the atmosphere in my local area.

The impulse suppressed, I put the item back on the shelf and went home hunted out the straight Eyrt snips and comparisons made reinforced my reservations about the cheaper copy.

Vice grips -the brand - are yet another example of the cheapening of the original product.Compare an old set against a Erwin model and see the rivets and pins are smaller and the springs Thinner in section, the chrome plating is thinner- One might as buy a no name brand.I do have a few no name v grips but they are modified for specfic purposes.

Grahame

Originally Posted by nearnexus

I don't agree with your hypothesis Michael.

Bad design is nothing new, it's always been around us,

The automotive industry is a prime example - endless stupidity in badly designed, poorly placed, totally unsuited, almost impossible to work on design.

Agree - bad design is nothing new and I would not say that engineers always get it right, but those examples from the car industry actually reinforce the point - the marketing guys want the new model for (example) the Sydney motor show in 2017. The stylists develop designs for how the car is going to look. The bean counters get involved with the marketing guys and the specification ends up saying that feature X can cost $6.55. That's it. The design engineer can spend up to $6.55 per car on a feature that must be ready for the motor show. He/she is locked into a cost and a date. Bad luck if it can't be done in the time frame, bad luck if you can't get all the function that you want. That feature must be on the car, because marketing only works if there is a point of differentiation.
The feature itself may have only been a gleam in the stylist's eye - that is, "we need a cup holder and it must be located around here somewhere" How it packs away and deploys is left to the engineer, which is why Phil's daughter's cup holder was such a B to fix. He/she was constrained by cost and real estate.
Even the functional stuff is no different. The size of the car and hence the engine bay is dictated by marketing/ industrial design. Bad luck if there is not enough room to work on it comfortably. Apparently the engineers working on the Veron were told that the shape of the car was fixed. Anything they needed to do had to fit within that shape. No exceptions (normally there is a little wriggle room).

(Another) true story. I had a designer tell me that they wanted a feature in an appliance that functions just like the one in brand X. "But that one does not have that function" I said. "Oh" said designer. "We want one just like the one in brand X, but has a ... function!". It's easy when you can tell others to sort out the problems...

The "designed with the end user in mind" idea is one that good designers try to bear in mind, but when you have washing machines styled by 23yo men fresh out of uni who still live at home (and their mothers do the washing), what hope have you got?

Michael

I think I have worked out how the design thingy goes within the car industry!

At Nissan things seem pretty straight forward to me. Only takes two blokes to design a car!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmmBfT6HYmM

Simon

Michael great input as well as others who see the other side of things.

In the auto industry there is a book of times taken to do jobs its done up by bean counters who have never been on the floor or waiting in line to use machines or tools. While those who do use them might have to alter settings not once but many times to produce what they need to. This is worse when your building custom designed or you have to work around others stuff ups.

Manufacturing in the bus and coach industry as I did as well as the engineering top shop making pressed items using punch machines etc. Anything can still go wrong.

I remember our Tech teacher who made each of us measure an item the same item write down exactly what we saw, Then my eyes were 20/20 other with coke bottle glasses. Yes some had the same reading others either side.

having worked as a mechanic seeing machined bell housing line up holes out by 2 to 3 mm as well as input shafts out into flywheels by 1.5 which throughout my gear box badly.

Cheap crap not my landcrusier

Design, can be a complicated process. Initially it consists of determining what the constraints are and what functionality is desired. As basic as it must do A,B,C and D.. and it has to fit in this much space, and cost less than $X

No black magic really, but stuff I've done is mostly industrial control, where the constraints are bomb proof, bullet proof.. and ultra reliable.. belts braces watchdogs and layers of fail over.. cost is usually not high on the list.

Consumer and automotive electronics are designed to quite different constraints to, say, Military, Avionics, Medical or Industrial.. you might have equipment with similar functionality, but totally different design constraints and design emphasis.
By emphasis, to illustrate, what's the difference between a school bus and a ferrari? both have 4 wheels, a motor, fuel-tank, headlights etc... it's just a question of emphasis. (and constraints)

I've seen plenty of consumer products where you would think the design is really bad, because they used component X to save 0.01c instead where common sense says they should have used component Y, but, is that really bad design? The designer was given a brief to do something with cost constraints, and came up with a novel solution that saved some fractions of a cent... you could argue that it's actually good design, because he got the job done within the constraints.

I can recall a meeting once where there was full-on shouting match between the accountants and the engineers over the addition on a single red led, that cost just a few cents....

Back to power consumption, nowadays most battery powered electronics the power consumption is determined more by the software than the hardware, deciding when to slow the cpu clock, and when to sleep, how to wake etc... all software design decisions.. In the case of Mits vs the Chinese, I haven't dissassembled either, but I'm willing to bet that the Mitutoyo would be a fully custom proprietry ic.

Ray

Originally Posted by Michael G

• In an effort to save expensive resources, the design of equipment may not even be done by an engineer. Especially with product that is a copy of something existing in the market (that is, something without radical new technology in it), it may be given to someone who is just told "make one of these". In the case of cheap digital calipers, a draftsperson could have been given a Mitutoyo pair and told to reverse engineer the circuit board. However, one of the things about developing new product properly is learning the tricks involved - so the Mitutoyo engineers may know that the tolerance on a particular component is critical but a copier won't. Result is less than optimal performance.One company making appliances discovered that the optimal control curve is almost but not quite a straight line...

Michael

Hi Michael,

in the particular case of the "Chinese Caliper" I can shed some light.

A small Swiss family metrology business by the name of Sylvac had designed and patented in 1972 (by Hans-Ulrich Meyer) "capacitive displacement measuring instrument".

Looking for ways to reduce cost, the inexperienced Sylvac found a Chinese company that was able to produce caliper parts in China. Big mistake, the Chinese company gave the confidential know how to other Chinese factories. And thus the "Chinese Caliper" that we all know was born. It is an unauthorized clone of the first generation Sylvac capacitive caliper. Sylvac is a small family owned business and does not have the money to fight patent infringment in China. The Swiss learned their lesson, and later caliper generations are again manufactured in Switzerland and the know-how stays there too. This is the Sylvac website: Sylvac - Swiss manufacturer of precision measuring instruments
Nowdays Sylvac calipers use their own "absolute" inductive sensing patent. Probably because the capacitive systems is incompatible with liquids. In the US, Sylvac calipers are sold by Fowler.

If I would say one thing, it is that design should at least be getting BETTER than in earlier days, given the CAD and design computing software power now available.

I remember when I was in IT (mainframes) GM ran the design for the 1972 HQ Holden through it's new generation software in about mid 80's and found that the car had about twice as much steel in some/many areas as necessary.

Probably why they were so robust in real world crashes.

But getting back to early design, the poms pulled some real shockers with their vehicle designs pre 70's, and I believe most British tanks in WW2 were so badly designed they broke down and saw stuff all action.

LOL it's a good subject.

Rob

If bean counters can make engineers cut corners and do it cheap ........what hope have we got buying the stuff exy or cheap.

If you guys think that the design and design constraints on stuff you can touch is bad, you'd really, really hate to know what goes on in *software* development..... I've walked away from some software projects, big ones, run by really big firms, because I just *knew* it was a total screwup early on. I away 2 years of my life on one notable failure and the lesson sunk in. Never again. Of course not everyone has the luxury of quitting, but it's very satisfying compared with the alternative. Mind you one of these days someone is going to get a 99 year licence suspension because I found a logic path to an event I was told "could never happen and therefore didn't need to be considered". Of course it's likely that someone has subsequently removed that little clause in a complex CASE statement - but I wouldn't bet money on it...... PDW

Originally Posted by PDW

If you guys think that the design and design constraints on stuff you can touch is bad, you'd really, really hate to know what goes on in *software* development..PDW

Yes, we have glaring examples of this in Toyotas that speed up to flat out in the USA, VW Golf that shut down at any old time, jet aircraft where thrust is reduced on stall warnings, the list goes on.

Rob

Originally Posted by wheelinround

having worked as a mechanic seeing machined bell housing line up holes out by 2 to 3 mm

Castlemaine Rod shop bellhousing?

Originally Posted by nearnexus

... jet aircraft where thrust is reduced on stall warnings, the list goes on.

Rob

Can you provide specific examples of this?