The Tenth Face of Innovation is The Storyteller. Life is full of stories and being able to tell a good one can make all the difference in the world.
All in Career & Professionalism
The Problem in Pursuing Your Passion
“Follow your Passion.” Is that good advice or not? Like most things, the answer might be a little more complicated.
Getting the Most Out of a Career Fair
Welcome to Autumn! The Fall is the season for trees changing their colors, warmer jackets, and career fairs. Don’t miss out on learning about, and preparing for, an important step that can set you up for an amazing career.
A Simple Hack for Completing Long-Term Projects
To be clear, there are many factors that lead to project success; attitude, knowledge, process, opportunity, resources, and more. This article gives one simple process technique that anyone can do. I chose this one because it has been a significant part of my process for the last 20 years and has been the foundation of my best work.
To the Graduating Class
As you transition from being a student to being a professional, consider latching on to the 5 professional attributes described in this article. They will distinguish you from your peers.
Becoming Effective and Efficient in Your Work
Fluency means to do something with ease and accuracy. I would love to do mechanical engineering with ease and accuracy! This is something I aspire to, and for good reason. It means I can do more with my time. This article describes 5 things we all need to do to become more effective and efficient in our technical work.
Why Go to Graduate School?
During my graduate program, I finally fell in love with school. That's right. It took more than four years after high-school, but it happened to me.
What is a Fellowship?
Simply put, a fellowship is a distinguished honor accompanied by a monetary award “that graduate students or postgraduate scholars typically compete for, and fellows are selected based on their potential to make a positive, long-lasting contribution to their academic discipline”
Design in Data Figures: Rasterized Versus Vectorized
Have you ever zoomed in on an image and it was so pixelated you couldn’t read or understand anything? Have you ever had an email get stuck behind a filter because your figures or images were too big in terms of file size? If any of that sounds familiar, you might be using the wrong kind of images or figures.
Design in Data Figures: The Ratio of Data-to-Non-Data
Never heard of the data-to-not-data ratio in figures? It’s a good thing to know and consider. This is one article in a series of techniques and practices for designing good figures and visualizations.
The Fifth Face of Innovation: The Collaborator
Everyone needs collaborators to be successful in design, engineering, and life! Even the lone artist, scientist, and author eventually need collaborators to critique, distribute, buy, or share their work, regardless of how many hours are spent in isolation. Find out what Tom Kelley shares about being a Collaborator - the fifth face of innovation.
Mechanical Design
As someone who loves design of all kinds, it can be easy to get carried away and lose track of where I, as a mechanical engineer, fit in the design world. For me it is important to understand what makes mechanical design different than any other kind of design. Understanding this puts me in a better position to know how my specific training and design decisions can affect the world.
Lenses to Interpret the Visual Form of Products and Why it Matters
Lenses are useful to focus and bend light. In design, metaphorical lenses can likewise focus our attention and bend our design towards various essential factors.
“Caveat Emptor” – Let the Buyer Beware
Caveat Emptor… Who are you really designing for? Yourself? The Customer? The Customer’s Future?
Self-Made: A Conversation with Drew Henry
Many people have asked if it is possible to become an engineer without a degree. When we pose this question to Google, we get more than 30 million results in response to this question. Answers ranged from a solid no to multiple sites listing jobs in engineering that don’t require a degree. In reality, it depends on the field, the job, and often where you live. To learn more about this path to engineering, we decided to interview a successful business-owner and self-taught engineer to get his take on this topic.
Racism in America, manifested in engineering design: A pledge to take responsibility and action
Changes in our systems must happen everywhere, across all industries, and I believe engineers and designers have an important role and responsibility in the U.S’ plight against injustices.
Getting the Most out of Digital Calipers
If your job involves product or part geometry, I believe you should own and use a pair of digital calipers. They are one of the most important measurement tools to access the details of the geometry you’re working with. Even if your job is purely theoretical, it can be helpful to simply use the calipers to visualize the size and scale of features you’re specifying or being asked to work with.
Design in Data Figures: Absolute Versus Relative Scales
The right scale can make all the difference in the world when it comes to appropriate data figures. This is one article in a series of techniques and practices for designing good figures and visualizations.
Design in Data Figures: Dealing with Occlusion
Communication with data figures can be a large part of design. This is the beginning of a series of techniques and practices for designing good figures and visualizations.
Human-Centered Engineering: A Conversation with Professor Nathan Johnson
Editors from the BYU Design Review recently sat down with Professor Nathan Johnson, an associate professor in The Polytechnic School of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University, with research areas in global sustainability and systems engineering. Check out a few short passages taken from the interview.