Robotic Lawn Mower

In connection with our robotic vacuum cleaner project, we worked on a long term project with the same client for a robotic lawn mower. In this project, ZJU was combining a number of its mechanical, electrical, robotic, and design teams with the engineers from the source company. That meant a few things but the biggest effect of working with such a large and specialized team was that our job as designers and thinkers was shown in full light. Sadly, most of the requirements of the finished product were predetermined so we did not get to go though a complete design process to find the consumer needs. Instead, we concentrated more on facilitating the work of the engineering team from an elemental design efficiency standpoint, as well as outward styling and communication with the client and various ZJU teams. In addition, Lab 318 and Lab 127 were providing the modelling as we had a few fulltime CATIA seats on our permanent team.

My role on this project was as a consultant to some of the aspects of the design team from Lab 318. Although I was not directly involved in the design, I aided in the design of algorithms for path finding.

This project is obviously quite large and many months by many people were spent on it so it was not worked on by the design team every day. However, it was really interesting to watch as over the months the product came together into firstly a finished concept, then a prototype and finally go preparation for manufacture. As my involvement was limited to research and some advising on certain aspects, I was not too worried about how things went on the project. Instead, when it was the center of every one's attention, I could watch closely in an effort to understand the subtleties of their immense pipeline and learn more about the Chinese design method.

After watching many meetings, of which I could only understand the drawings and 1 in 100 words, I found that in general their overall method is similar to that which we would discuss at RMIT. That said, their concept methods and development methods seem to be a bit different. For concept work, they would not research first then build a set of parameters and sketch around that idea. Instead, they would guess what they were making and do a lot of concept sketches, then build backwards to get a well designed set of interior workings. In the outward-in process, although they would ship some of the work to engineers, they would continue to work with the engineers quite closely. For this particular product, we used Lab 127 to house the prototyping and development sectors so when the mechanics were being ironed out, this lab contained a few ID people, a few engineers and a few CATIA modelers. They worked one-to-one to build the good practices and effective structural design into the shell that the design team had previously carved out. Once a mechanical system was decided upon, the files were sent off to a prototyping company (the same one I burnt my foot at, in fact) who returned a fully functional frame a week or so later. I do not know much about the early history of the electronic systems for this project, but once we had a base to work on there was a motherboard strapped to it and tests were being run to develop a home friendly and functional robot. As far as I know, this process is still underway.

Upon reflection on my encounter with this project, I think I have now seen a product go from a list of needs on a piece of paper to a nearly consumer-ready, autonomous disk that cuts grass and recharges itself. Details aside, the fact of watching a near complete product pipeline inclusive of virtually every respect of the final outcome was pretty impressive. Despite my small role in this project, I learnt a huge amount about what can be done with design. It seems the value of this education is the communication I can help people have.

Vacuum Cleaner Project Zero

This project was a long term effort to create a great robotic vacuum cleaner. When I first interacted with Lab 318, the project was in its third revision and almost everyone had worked on some aspect of it at some point. Like our other long term fullscale project, the Robotic Lawn Mower, we did not talk about it every day. Also, because it was it was only a revision, we did not need to redevelop everything from the ground up. As far as I know, the task started as a face lift on the current frame and then some performance improvements were included in the mechanical object and software.

My role on this team was quite small in the grand scheme of things because most of the permenant crew were not English speakers. At first, I worked on some of the early concept work when the face lift was being set out. Later I worked as a consultant using prior knowledge of the end market place as well as knowledge of robotics and algorithm design which would be used to construct more efficient artificial intelligence. Finally, I went to the manufacturing facility in one of the later stints with the company's engineers.

This project was interesting because when I first saw the tell-tale shape of a robotic vacuum cleaner in the lab back in February, I thought that they may have worked on the original product. However, it was not until much later, after working in the same lab as the core team for about 3 weeks, that I was lead to understand that this one was made by another company. The company is FUDA, a long time client of the lab that dominates the vacuum cleaner market in China. Though the form of our robot was not all that different from early birds like the Roomba, it had been completely designed in house and seems not to have been a copy. I think their visual similarity is more likely to be an effort to capitalize on the success of the original.

Despite the mass of work assosiated with this project, it seemed never to really dominate the lab. This may be because our deadline was distant because there was a version already in the market but its effect on the working method was quite noticeable. It was hardly talked about until it was on the verge of completion, at which point we had a press conference with a number of local news companies.

As you may imagine, the team for a project like this is quite large. However, the industrial design group's connection was always very strong. At the moment, for instance, this project is in the hands of electrical engineers in Lab 127 for refinement of the motherboard, but they answer to the design team back in Lab 318 who are in charge of the human interaction so involvement is as high as ever.

Changing Work Places

One day, after the mid-semester, week-long May First holiday, I got up and left as usual to go to the Creative Group room where I worked. On my walk there I ran into a boy who I had met when I first met ZJU students. His name was Blake and we said hello and he said something about some lab being closed and that I should go somewhere else. I did not really get the message and we were walking in opposite directions so it was disregarded. When I arrived at the the room it was locked, which was not a huge surprise but not normal, either. I had a key so I let myself in only to find that all the computers and everything else of value had been removed. I was a little shocked and called one of the lab coordinators, Chen Zhiliang. He said that over the holiday the Creative Group had been dissolved and that I was to be moved into a different lab. He then said I should go home and that I would be contacted about where to go later.

I waited a few days and was called by one of the other lab members. He asked me to meet him and he walked me to Lab 318, where I would spend the rest of the year working. At that point I was a bit lost as to what was going on here and there but I moved my stuff over to the new lab and started going there every day. This was the beginning of a very new interaction with ZJU.

Red Dot 2006

This was an effort that the Creative group (and later some other ZJU competition teams) put towards the 2006 Red Dot Concept Award competition. This competition is open so we spent a lot of time looking for a good approach.

My role on this project was as an innovation team member. During the course of the project I did a few specific things for the team including a few "Getting Out of the Box" sessions and another "Looking for Need" workshop. Details on these are below:

1. "Getting Out of the Box" sessions: These were a number of occasions designed to press some of the importance of leaving the lab and seeing more of the world to get more informed design outcomes. We walked around some areas of Hangzhou for quite some time, documenting human behavior and looking for weak signals and discussing design needs that we were seeing or experiencing.
2. "Looking for Need" workshop: This was a workshop where we discussed finding the need behind a design and finding a need before creating design. The goal was to start to introduce some of areas of interest for our Red Dot submission to find some problems that were not too big to tackle.
   

I was not part of the finishing team because by the due date of this project the Creative Group had dissolved and I had been moved into Lab 318. I was then busy with other projects and a new team was created to finish up the Red Dot submissions.

I was only really involved in this project for a few weeks but during that time I became a lot more confident that I had something valuable to offer others and I became a lot more able to speak publicly and without prompts. I think I also learnt about managing group projects and working towards a team ideal a little better. These things mentioned, I think I learnt more by watching the other student's approch to the project than by my own experience. They worked so much harder and did so much more contextualizing research than any other group of designers or design students I had ever worked with. I got the impression that they were really interested in their work and they they were really interested in winning. I found out later that this paid off.

Zing Gang and a Workshop

As part of our preparation for the Red Dot competition the creative group went to Zing Gang, a larger newer campus of ZJU, to do a workshop on innovative pipelines for groups.

Before we started they showed me around the campus for a while. It was quite beautiful and very spacious although not quite complete. Between classes the rodes teamed with students and bikes and during classes they were baron with almost no one walking around. It is enclosed but so large that walking through it would not be convenient for most people so the only people there were students.

The aim of the workshop was to help students work together on innovative or concept rich projects from a western point of view. I was talking about a few ways of looking at tasks and breaking them up to create better work hand offs within long projects. The method I was discussing involved having various meetings involving the whole team to ensure continuity and being true to the intentions of other project teams within the group.

Before I started talking we walked around to find a good place for everyone to sit down. There is a body of water in this campus so we thought sitting near it would be nice. I found a tree and tried to climb up and sit in it so I could look over the group better but as I swung on the first branch it broke and I fell to the ground. This was quite amusing and we eventually decided sitting on the ground would be safer. On later attempts of climbing on things I was cautioned as people reminded me of this incident. Perhaps one day I will learn.

After introducing the ideas we did a trial run with a slightly reduced work flow as we only had one afternoon and a team of about 20 people. We started with a finding need exercise in which people would conduct random interviews on the streets of the campus during lunch time. After a while we presented findings back to the group and moved on to information processing and then brainstorming.



By the end of the day we had a lot of concepts and were all tired so we went to a restaurant just outside the campus and had a big meal. That night I went to a Korean drinking party that turned a bit risqué before ending with an underage American boy passing out. I for some reason offered to carry him off and which was quite a ordeal. Eventually I got home to find that I had had some form of food poisoning and was quite ill for the next day or two. I miss China.

Design Boom: Shelter in a Cart

This was a group approach to a Design Boom competition titled Shelter in a Cart. The aim of the competition was to develop a cart for homeless people that could be used both to move belongings as well as provide shelter for the owner.

My role on this project was as a member of the core innovation team. In this role I helped manage other parts of the team and helped people contextualize homeless situations around the world. I also ran a workshop called "Finding Need" that aimed to help people look at ways to find problems that are not too hard to solve. I was asked to do this because I had been working for a company in the United States doing a large scale feasibility study on a management work over that required me to find problems within the current system that were solvable within the context of the desired change.

I was not able to be part of the finishing team as I was out of town on another project during the time of the final push.

I think that I learnt a few things from this project, but what has seemed most valuable was the knowledge that things I know and have learnt through experience or formal education can be useful for other people. At the time of this project I was struggling hard to overcome the language barriers and although a few member of the team were quite good at English, most had quite a bit of trouble and at this point my Chinese was non-existent.

Creative Group

After about a week of waiting to be placed in a working environment I was called by one of the first students I had met and he chaperoned me to my work place. I talked though the nature of the group and a short while later it was lunch. After lunch, the guy I already knew had some stuff to do so I returned to the lab to finish up the day with the rest of its members.

The group I was to be part of was a team of about 10 students all working to win as many competitions as possible. Although there was no full time management, a member of staff would occassionally come in to offer a hand. The rest of the time 1 or 2 of the students would keep the team moving although most of the members were also working on their own projects in their spare time. They had a great track record!

We participated in a multitude of competitions and I was given a key. My colleagues were also interested in my work and when I showed them they asked me to give a few talks about a some of the things I had done.