Project: Planning

The project planning has been separated from the initial ideation and drawing process to allow for revisions.

Objectives

After this exercise, you should be able to:

  1. Collaborate remotely on a project plan.

  2. Identify a critical path of engineering unknowns.

  3. Write a bill of materials.

Prompts

  1. How do you propose to divide the tasks among the team? What roles will you each undertake and for which parts?

  2. Proof-of-concept. Nearly every design raises a set of key questions which form the primary hurdles. What’s a quick experiment to tackle the most difficult part first? Either the unknowns will resolve into a feasible development plan or you can fail fast on one approach and revert to another. Either way, you won’t have wasted effort on secondary development which becomes obviated by a problem. The proof of concept will usually be a partial prototype, and in many cases it can be modified into a full prototype if successful.

  3. What features do you specifically propose to ignore? E.g., a project involving a wearable device could focus on sensing and actuation but choose to ignore battery operation in favor of a wired supply. In general, we’d prefer you keep your workload under control by emphasizing interesting behavior or interactivity over fit and finish.

  4. What features do you specifically propose to test? How will we know if it worked?

  5. What qualitative or quantitative metrics can we apply to gauge the success of the prototypes?

Checklist

The following represents a minimum result, please extend this as appropriate for your given idea. A comprehensive result should give you confidence you have a plausible path to a working prototype.

  1. Technical plan.

    • Objectives for the first proof-of-concept demonstration.

    • Known unknowns and contingencies. What cannot be decided now but may be revealed by a proof-of-concept test? What will be the possible alternatives from which to choose?

  2. Project management.

    • Designated individual responsibilities, as applicable.

    • Remote collaboration plan: how will work be communicated and coordinated across distance?

  3. Draft of Bill of Materials.

    • A bill of materials is a document listing every single part in a design.

    • Please write it as a matrix or spreadsheet, including the following:

      • a name for every part

      • quantities for each part

      • identification of parts to be designed and fabricated

      • specific kit parts expected to be used

      • independently purchased or acquired parts

      • special materials in use

    • This will necessarily be incomplete at this stage; the primary objective is to communicate a thorough consideration of all aspects of the paper design in order to identify critical issues early.

Deliverables

Please report your project planning text and bill of a materials as a joint post on the course 16-223 WordPress site. Please create only one post per group.