This page provide some recommendations and insights from several semesters of advising senior design teams. While the material presented in the course is correct, there are some additional details or practices that enhance the planning and execution of the proposed project. Most of them involve the planning stage, which ultimately impacts execution.

While Gantt charts are nice, they can be far too detailed while at the same time missing important aspects of the best way to execute the construction process. Additionally, Pert charts are easy to make without thinking too deeply about what is an effective execution strategy for the team. I advocate creating a few additional planning documents that precede the Gannt and Pert charts. These documents are visual and textual summaries of the proposed design solution.

Often I advise teams whose projects involve non-trivial physical design components. Naturally, mechanical and physical design is not a forte of ECE students. Thus initial designs tend to be simplistic, describe individual pieces without contemplating their union, or miss important fabrication considerations. To overcome this I recommend following the same iterative and exploratory design procedure that students in industrial design classes do.

For both the inital thinking about the product, as well as the final demonstration, I recommend doing something called storyboarding, which is the process of describing and visualizing interface scenarios between the user and the product. I am not sure if the hits will be the best, but here is a google search for the topic (try clicking on the “engineering” option since we are engineers).

As engineers, we should be somewhat familiar with this. In Physics classes we learn about gedankenexperiments, otherwise translated as though-experiments. Here physical scenarios are specified and imagined. Applying the laws of physics to these scenarios leads to hypothesized outcomes in order to reason through a particular concept. The design process should involve something similar. Storyboarding is a way to force the designer to think about the user interaction and the designed item more thoroughly, from the beginning to the end of the interaction. If multiple pathways are possible, then they should be outlined.

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