WEEK 5

This week was our very first online tutorial session for this module. We came in with curiosity, not knowing how the lesson will be carried out without all of the interactive fun we had in class when we are in campus. Nevertheless, the group came in knowing that we will definitely learn something new and cool from this session.

💭 Brief summary of the lesson

For this session, Dr. Noel went through different materials for design for 3 different products, shown in the PowerPoint slides. An example will be a hairdryer and the timeline of how hairdryers evolved and how the design of it got much simpler and user friendly. The illustration below shows the timeline of a hairdryer.

After the explanation, each group went ahead to select an exotic material and thought of its uses for it. We also came up with 2 ideas to how the material can be a direct replacement to a product without the need to change its design, and also how the material can replace a material used for a product and the changes that must be made to the product for the newly replaced material to function better and possibly being more convenient for the users.

👷 What the group has learnt

Through the lesson that Dr. Noel went through, we started to understand how materials can actually affect the product's design directly and how both parameters can be coordinated well together and optimized to create a newer and refined product that will be very useful, convenient and user friendly for its consumers, and maybe provide new features as well.

An example will be the first hair dryer that was invented in the 1890s. The hairdryer was made of metal and it is very bulky and heavy, thus making it not portable and convenient for the user. Moreover, it is made of metal, thus, users can be easily burnt due to metals being a good conductor of heat.

As time progresses, the design of the hairdryer improved and at our current era, hairdryers are small, portable and the cover of the product is made of plastic. The changes in material and designs made the product much safer and convenient for the user.

We also learnt that in this rapidly evolving world, new materials are being developed every now and then, either "accidentally" or intentionally. These materials are deemed as "exotic" as most of them are very new or are unheard of to the public. However, they bring new uses to our current products.

Through the activity we did, we researched about this shape memory alloy called nitinol. From the research, we realized that there are many uncapped opportunities that have yet to be normalized to better improve the current state of our products. This activity enhanced our understanding of the direct impact materials can bring to the design of a product even further as we are able to come across many examples that showed improvements to a product due to the change of material used.

Therefore, we concluded that this ideology of how materials can affect the design of a product, will boost the functionality, convenience and user friendliness of our current products to another level.