Reflection – Visualization through Prototypes

Challenge  I am member of an organization where we design, test and mass produce 2 wheelers and 3  wheelers. I work as Design engineer in Research and Development department. Our main challenge  was to create innovative designs to keep up with the emerging market needs and for future growth  of the company. One such task was for me to design a gearbox for a 3-wheeler Electric vehicle. This  project was initialized to align the Indian government mission of reducing pollution and Make in  India movement. During one of the initial trials of making a mechanism for a transmission system, I  just had to present a design and challenge was to convince my colleagues and HODs to let me pursue  an innovative design and to get the internal customers pain points and feedback.

Selection  The tool I used here to put my ideas across and persuade others to make sure that there is a shared  understanding amongst all the stakeholders before directly jumping to the solutions. I had to work  with HODs to the lowest level of contract labors for the proof of the concept.

Application  To create the design, I used Computer Aided Designing tool – CREO to show the 3D models of the  design prepared. This helped us in visualizing the initial design and make sure that the concept fits in  the available space in the existing vehicle. Even after this activity, few of the review panel members  from the Design Review were skeptic about the application of the concept in the vehicle in dynamic  conditions. To have a common understanding across the departments before using this solution, we  arranged a meeting with Subject Expert Matters.

For this activity, I had created a working model with the help of 3D printing method Fusion  Deposition Modelling to help everyone visualize the parts’ functioning and to enable others to  clearly see the working of the parts. Once the meeting started, we also used the Storytelling tool to  make sure that the participants of the meeting were kept interested by showing the evolution of the  transmission over the years and then jumped to our concept. Then we showcased our prototypes to  everyone and we assured them that these are the initial trials and we wanted their feedback on  wither manufacturing or assembly or quality improvements so that their inputs are valued and thus  to keep them closely knit and feel contributed.

After this SEM feedback session, all the feedbacks were documented and circulated. In the next  meeting, the action plan from the previous meetings were discussed and clarified why few of the  feedbacks were not incorporated in the design.

All the stakeholders had got a hands on these parts and provided valuable feedbacks which had gone  back into the design room and were rectified then to make sure that we created a design which is  easy to manufacture, assemble and to service. Most of the parts do not consider the pain points of  the stakeholders and thus the parts are heavily criticized by them in either assembly line or service  centers.

This process of SEM meetings to showcase the existing design helped them visualize the  functionality and helped them give the feedbacks even before manufacturing the parts. This helped  the design team to make sure that there were minimal design changes and the time to deliver  designs shrunk to a large extent.

Insight & Approach  Learning and insights in this activity is that people tend to give feedback better on the physical parts  rather than just showing 3D models. They feel valued when they are pooled in the design stage  itself. This helped the whole organization to shrink the project timeline and deliver the projects prior  to the competitors and staying ahead of them. During the initial showcase of CAD models, there  were very few inputs, and when we shifted to have SEM meetings with prototype, we understood  the diverse issues from the stakeholders’ point of view and vice versa. This helped us identify the  potential root causes and with this collaborative effort, we used the Design reviews to show the  graphic changes that were incorporated to obtain instant feedback.

From this project, when we realized the potential benefits of SEM meetings with prototype, we used  this visualization activity as a starting point for design thinking activities for upcoming projects as  well. This helped us to start as a reference point and thus it acted as a tool throughout each and  every project so that the concerned stakeholder was also thinking in same lines as ours to help us  better design parts that were appreciated by most of the stakeholders and also crunched the project  timeline.

