Industrial Design Engineering

Inventive Problem Solving

John X. Wang

• Editorial: CRC Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351671842
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Operazioni

Designing new products and improving existing ones is a continual process. Industrial design engineering is an industrial engineering process applied to product designs that are to be manufactured through techniques of production operations. Excellent industrial design engineering programs are essential for the nation's industry to succeed in selling useful and ecologically justifiable and usable products on a market flooded with goods and services. This unique text on industrial design engineering integrates basic knowledge, insight, and working methods from industrial engineering and product design subjects. Industrial Design Engineering: Inventive Problem Solving provides a combination of engineering thinking and design skills that give the researchers, practitioners, and students an excellent foundation for participation in product development projects and techniques for establishing and managing such projects. The design principles are presented around examples related to the designing of products, goods, and services. Case studies are developed around real problems and are based on the customer's needs.

chapter one

Enduring sonnet

Evolving industrial design engineering

And from my pillow, looking forth by light

Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold

The antechapel where the statue stood

Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

William Wordsworth

The Prelude (1850)

Industrial design engineers are continuing the voyage through strange seas of thought. The voyage is an enduring quest. The process of industrialization that began over 200 years ago is continuing to change the way people work and live, and doing it rapidly and globally. At the forefront of this movement is the profession of industrial engineering that develops and applies the technology that drives industrialization. This chapter describes how industrial design engineering evolved over the past two centuries developing methods and principles for the planning, design, and control of production and service systems. We will focus on the growth of the discipline that helped shape the industries worldwide and made substantial contributions to the industrialization of America and the world.

1.1 “A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought”

Logo design is an important area of industrial design engineering. Through logo design, a number of industrial designers have made such a significant impact on culture and daily life that their work is documented by historians of industrial science and engineering.

Raymond Loewy was a prolific American designer who is responsible for the Royal Dutch Shell corporate first logo. The original BP logo was in use until 2000. Apple’s iconic logo has endured over the years. It’s a slick graphic apple, almost perfect in symmetry save for its leaf and characteristic bite. Apple’s enduring logo has evolved from Apple’s first logo, which was greatly influenced by the “Enduring Sonnet” as an effective form for industrial communication (see Section 1.2).

Apple was founded as a partnership on April Fool’s Day 1976 by three people who originally worked at Atari: Steven Gary Wozniak (1950–), Steven Paul Jobs (1955–2011), and Ronald Gerald Wayne (1934–). The first Apple logo was created in 1976 by former Atari draftsman/engineer Ron Wayne, who also wrote the Apple I manual and drafted the partnership agreement. Apple was incorporated on January 3, 1977, without Wayne, who sold his shares back.

In Apple, Ron Wayne’s first order of business was designing a logo, and he created something he said was based on the personalities of both Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak. Compared with Apple’s iconic logo, a slick graphic apple, almost perfect in symmetry save for its leaf and characteristic bite, Apple’s original logo had a completely different look—something you’d be more likely to find within the pages of a Victorian novel than adorning a piece of high-tech wizardry.

As shown in Figure 1.1, Apple’s first logo was related to Newton and the falling apple. As a fan of poetry, Ron Wayne put it into a Gothic frame, and within that he took the last line from a Wordsworth sonnet—“A mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.”

Figure 1.1 Newton and the falling apple: The first Apple logo with the last line from a William Wordsworth sonnet.

1.2 Enduring sonnet: Most elastic form of industrial communication

Probabilistic poetic expression enables us to communicate the most serious of themes with the simplest language. Robert Frost’s “Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same” exemplifies the “American sonnet” form.

As the most elastic form of communication, the sonnet can be traced back to the “Italian sonnet.” Although there are earlier precedents, the first important sonneteers were Dante (1265–1321) and Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374). The Italian “sonnetto” maintains the following three elements:

• Octave: rhymed abba abba;

• Seset: rhymed more casually in any variation of cde cde; and

• Volta (or turn): the break between the two parts. Volta encourages a shift in tone.

The sonnet was brought to England through the translations of Petrarch by Wyatt and Surrey, written in the 1530s and 1540s and published in Tottel’s “Miscellany” (1557). The “English sonnet,” also known as the Shakespearean sonnet because of Shakespeare’s mastery of the form, is composed of the following:

• Three quatrains: rhymed abab, cdcd, efef; and

• One terminal couplet: gg

Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were probably written in the 1590s. Sonnet 12 provides a classic example of Shakespearean construction (Figure 1.2).

Sonnet 12: When I do count the clock that tells the time (see Figure 1.2)

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls ensilvered o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:

Then of thy beauty do I question make

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defence

William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

Figure 1.2 When I do count the clock that tells the time.

Here, we may notice the following:

• Related to the theme of falling leaves with the west wind, we may notice that Sonnet 12 reflects on things’ decay with time.

• The sonnet follows the pattern faithfully.

• It has 14 regular end-stopped lines.

• The first 8 lines are “soldered” together with “resonance.”

• Line 14 returns to the same “resonance” as line 8, answering the decay with “breed.”

• The poem has a secondary “robust” structure, that of Italian sonnet (or Petrarchan sonnet), which gives it great internal strength.

• Octave: lines 1–8 deal with decay in nature.

• Seset: lines 9–14 deal with decay of mortal things.

• Shakespeare honors the convention of the volta by adopting a “When… Then…” construction for the “action items” in the poem.

• Many variations on the motif “times’ inevitable progress” throughout the poem:

• Some refer to it as linear.

• Some refer to it as circular.

Here, our poetic expression facilitates risk communication, an important part of industrial communication.

1.3 Evolution, engineering breakthrough, and industrial design engineering

The history of industrial design engineering is a history of knowledge. When the earliest civilizations appeared in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China, they were largely constrained by their natural environment and by the climate. Philosophy, science, and art were largely determined by extra-human factors, such as seasons and floods. Over the course of many centuries, humans have managed to change the equation in their favor, reducing the impact of natural events on their civilization and increasing the impact of their civilization on nature.

This happened to be the history of industrial design engineering, an interdisciplinary field to become the “subject” of change, as opposed to being the “object” of change. The most important inventions date from prehistory. Here is a quick flashback:

• Tools, 2 million years ago, Africa

• Fire (heat generation), 1.9 million years ago, Africa

• Buildings 400,000 BC, France

• Burial, 70,000 BC, Germany

• Art, 28,000 BC

• Farming, 14,000 BC, Mesopotamia

• Animal domestication 12,000 BC

• Boat (8000 BC, Holland)

• Weapons (8000 BC); pottery, 7900 BC, China

• Weaving, 6500 BC, Palestine

• Money, sometime before the invention of writing, Mesopotamia

• Musical instruments, 5000 BC, Mesopotamia

• Metal and metal structure, 4500 BC, Egypt

• Wheel and transportation systems, 3500 BC, Mesopotamia

• Writing, 3300 BC, Mesopotamia (see Figure 1.3)

• Glass, 3000 BC, Phoenicia

• Sundial, 3000 BC, Egypt

During the Jemdet Nasr period (ca. 3100–2900 BC), writing was invented in Mesopotamia, perhaps in the city of Uruk (modern Warka), where the earliest inscribed clay tablets have been found in abundance. The Sumerian culture was not an isolated development but occurred during a period of profound transformations in politics, economy, and representational art. During the Uruk period of the fourth millennium BC, events included the following:

• The first Mesopotamian cities were settled.

• The first kings were crowned.

• A range of goods, from ceramic vessels to textiles, were mass-produced in state workshops.

Figure 1.3 Invention of writing, 3300 BC, Mesopotamia. (Cuneiform tablet: administrative account of barley distribution with cylinder seal impression of a male figure, hunting dogs, and boars; courtesy, the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) The clay tablet most likely documents grain distributed by a large temple, although the absence of verbs in early texts makes them difficult to interpret with certainty. The seal impression depicts a male figure guiding two dogs on a leash and hunting or herding boars in a marsh environment.

Early writing was used primarily as a means of recording and storing economic information. From the beginning a significant component of the written tradition consisted of lists of words and names that scribes needed to know in order to keep their accounts. Signs were drawn with a reed stylus on pillow-shaped tablets, most of which were only a few inches wide. The stylus left small marks in the clay which we call cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, writing.

1.4 The river: Where the first major civilizations were born

The first major civilizations were born in river valleys. Centralized authoritarian regimes are a direct consequence of large-scale irrigation agriculture: the problem of exploiting a river’s power, that is, of building precise and timely waterworks, can only be solved by mass labor, by the mobilization and coordination of thousands of people, which is only possible in societies organized around centralized planning and capable of imposing absolute discipline. The bigger the river the greater the promise of wealth the stronger the “hydraulic state” has to be. The masses mobilized for waterworks can then be mobilized for other collective efforts, such as pyramids, temples,and fortifications. A navigable river then provided the infrastructure for interacting with other communities, that is, for both trade and warfare.

Once the infrastructure was in place, disciplines including industrial design engineering grew rapidly on all fronts:

• Agriculture

• Architecture from the ziggurat of the Sumerians to the pyramids of the Egyptians to the temples of the Greeks

• Bureaucracy from the city-states of the Sumerians to the kingdom of Egypt and the empire of Persia to the economic empire of Athens

• Politics from the theocracies of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the democracy of Athens

• Religion from the anthropomorphic deities of Mesopotamia to the complex metaphysics of Egypt, from the tolerant pantheon of the Greeks to the one God of the Persians and the Jews

• Writing and book authoring from the “Gilgamesh” in Mesopotamia to the “Adventures of Sinuhe” in Egypt to the “Bible” of the Jews to Homer’s epics in Greece

• Economics from the agricultural societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt to the trade-based societies of Phoenicia and Athens

• Transportation systems from the horse-driven chariots of Mesopotamia to the Greek trireme

• Art from the funerary painting of the Egyptians to the realistic sculptures of the Greeks, etc.

As shown in Figure 1.4, the Pengtoushan culture was a Neolithic culture centered primarily on the central Yangtze River region in northwestern Hunan, China. It was roughly contemporaneous with its northern neighbor, the Peiligang culture. The two primary examples of Pengtoushan culture are the ty...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Author
• Chapter 1 Enduring sonnet: Evolving industrial design engineering
• Chapter 2 Monte Carlo simulation: Would an industrial engineer flip a coin like a poet?
• Chapter 3 Safety, reliability, and risk management: “All the astronauts landing on Mars are engineers; we are bringing them home safely …”
• Chapter 4 Design for environmental risk engineering
• Chapter 5 Cellular manufacturing: Mitigating risk and uncertainty
• Chapter 6 System risk engineering
• Chapter 7 Contingency planning, logistics, and Lean manufacturing: Rolling out the storm
• Chapter 8 Risk communications and continuous improvement: Poetic process engineering
• Chapter 9 On the river of industrial design engineering: Flow of poetic thinking
• Bibliography
• Index