Visit to Nissan, Sunderland

This week we visited Nissan's enormous car manufacturing plant in Sunderland. This was a fascinating insight in to the systems and processes behind mass manufacture of cars.

One thing that I found particularly interesting was the time that it took to do a job. Every single job that needed done - whether it was putting in the seats or installing the engine - took 59 seconds. This was vital to the flow of the continuous production line and the efficient manufacture of the cars. I can't even imagine the level of thought that must have gone in to the design to both make parts that work as intended AND can be fitted in less than a minute. 

Interestingly, though, despite all of the clever design done back at the office, some of the simplest innovations were made by the factory workers themselves. For example, workers used to have to carry a heavy tool belt with all they required to attach parts to the car as it moved along the line. A worker came up with the idea of a tool rack that can slide along a rail, minimising the weight that workers have to carry. I have to say that I was surprised that nobody had thought of it before, given the level of ingenuity in virtually everywhere else. 

I was also interested in the sheer amount of stuff that went in to a car. The bodyshell was inherently light - a person could easily pick up a whole side of a car. So why does a Nissan Quashqai weigh over two tonnes?! A lot of it seemed to be just stuff really. Electric everything, plastic everything. The dashboard in particular was an absolutely massive piece of plastic, too heavy for a worker to lift - unlike the main structural parts of the car!

So it got me thinking. Nissan Sunderland produces more than 500,000 cars a year. If each weighs on average 1500kg (a conservative estimate) then just that one plant is using 750,000,000kg of materials every year. Seven hundred and fifty MILLION kilograms. And Nissan have 40 manufacturing facilities worldwide. It struck me that designers have a huge responsibility when dealing with products on this scale and magnitude. By saving just one kilo on each car, just the Sunderland plant alone would save half a million kilograms of resources. By saving 500 kg per car - not impossible, family cars in the past averaged below 1000 kg - Nissan would save an incredible 2,551,489,500kg of materials, based on their global sales for 2013. That's over two and a half BILLION kilgrams of materials that have been dug up, refined, transported, manufactured in to a car, transported again, and then dragged around everywhere the cars drive for the rest of their working lives. It then all has to be disposed of too! 

I realised that this was serious. How come in the 1950s we could produce family cars that weighed a quarter of what a Quashquai does? There have been advances in safety and performance, granted, but there have also been advances in materials, engine technology and manufacturing methods. Why can't we be as frugal with materials as we once were, particularly in the day of real environmental concern?  

Colour - the Science behind the sense - Ben Craven

This week we had another fascinating lecture by Ben Craven, this time on colour and how we see it. He started off by pointing out that we are all in fact colour blind! There is actually no objective reality to colour - animals and humans all see colour in a different way, and none of them are the "correct" view of the world.

So how are we colour blind? Our eyes use three types of colour detecting cells. They each detect light from a different area of the spectrum, each giving the strongest signal for their particular area. The brain then compares results from all the cell types to work out what colour something is.

This also means that we can easily be tricked. Look at the image below:

It shows a red pen in a box. The box is split on to two compartments, each with apparently identical lights. But the lights are not actually the same. One is from a yellow light; the other is a mixture of red and green, which we see as yellow. As a result, the pen looks different under these two different - but apparently identical - lights. Under the red/green light, the pen looks red, as there is red light to reflect off it. Under the purely yellow light, there is no red to reflect off the pen, so it looks grey and dark.

 Ben demonstrated this principle to great effect with a red pepper during the demonstration. Under one light the pepper looked unbelievably vivid - both the red fruit and the green stalk. But under the other light, the pepper actually looked black!

All of this was a fascinating and important insight in to how we see colour and how important the light is to what we see.

Design Ethanography - Brian Loranger

Brian Loranger specialises in methods to find out what people do, how they do it, and, perhaps most importantly, why they do it.

Brian proposed the "top-down" approach to design process. He has an understanding of how a minute problem with a design can compound in to a larger problem, affecting the success of the design. This seemed to me to be the best approach to product design, and although Brian only broached the tip of the iceberg as far as the subject is concerned, I found it very useful.

So what methods can we use to achieve this? Anthropologists often embed themselves in a culture to learn about it, perhaps going to live for months or years with a South American tribe. Designers don't really have time for this, so we have to find other approaches. One vital point is that people's behaviour is changed by your presence - people are not going to behave normally if you sit in the corner of a room with a notebook and record all their actions.

A good example is empathetic development, or putting yourself in the user's situation. Designers at Ford used a suit - developed by anthropologists - to simulate old age, allowing them to better understand how this affects their interaction with a car.

This reminded me of a presentation by Seymour Powell, who showed how they developed products. Rather than asking or interviewing people, they watched them using things. Ask someone if there is anything wrong with their iron, for example, and they will probably say no. But watch them trying to use one, and watch them struggle to fill it up with water through the stupid little hole that all irons seem to have for no discernible reason. Seymour Powell discovered this through observation and designed a product to suit.

But sometimes, interview is the only option available. Brian talked about "grounded theory" and how to use it to get the most from an interview. The idea is to go in to the field without much knowledge - that way you don't develop any preconceived ideas. Go out, observe and then develop focus questions. The idea is to ask only a few generalised questions - open, not closed, to get a wholistic viewpoint. Minimise note taking as well - use recording technology so you can focus on interviewing rather than writing. 

I found Brian's lecture very interesting and will no doubt find his methods useful now and in future projects.

Cheaply made, or made to be cheap?

So, I've been thinking about my study for my end of semester project. I was thinking about the difference between cheaply made products, and products that are made to be cheap. What does that mean? Well, I'm interested in the design of the product. There are two ways to make a product cheaper to produce:

1. Use the cheapest materials and the cheapest methods. This almost certainly will result in something rubbish that won't last and is ultimately a waste of resources. The standard made-in-China McDonald's toy.

2. Very carefully and intelligently design the product to be cheap to make. Design it to work well with cheaper materials; minimise the material needed; design for cheaper tooling; design for less waste. The list goes on.

I will be looking in to this topic further to see what examples I can find.

The Aesthetics of Technology

This week Hugh Pizey talked to us about the aesthetics of technology - does form follow function?

2001 - A Space Odyssey

Ben Craven - Magnitudes

This week, we had Ben Craven providing a very interesting lecture on gauging the feasibility of ideas. Often it is hard to get a scale of something - for example, how much does it cost? Precise numbers may be difficult to work out, but sometimes you can work out a good estimate - is it £100 or £100,000?

The point here is to start to put numbers in to an idea to quickly find out if the idea is feasible or not. Ben pointed out how he has seen final year students nearing the end of a project who still don't have a vague idea if their idea is feasible or not!

Exact numbers are not needed - usually educated guesses will give and answer at least in the right order of magnitude.

Example - can we get power from closing filing cabinet drawers?

Let's assume that the drawer weighs 20kg (this is being deliberately optimistic.)

Let's say the drawer moves at 1m/s.

Using Ke = 0.5*m*v^2 gives 10J per drawer close.

Let's assume (optimistically again) that the drawer is closed every 5 minutes for 8 hours every day. This is about 100 times per day, so the total energy is 10J*100 = 1kJ.

Dividing this by the time in a day gives a power output of 0.01W.

So even with optimistic assumptions, and assuming that the process was 100% efficient, we still get a useless power output, and the idea is not viable.

It works the other way too - if you use pessimistic assumptions and still get good results, the idea is likely to be viable.

Ben also raised the point of the difference between accuracy and precision:
Accuracy is how close you are to the actual answer;
Precision is the "smallness" of the units used.

Using the same techniques, the class worked out approximate values for a wide variety of things in the lecture. These included the number of breaths taken in a year, the mass of 1km of road and the steps taken to walk 100 miles. More worryingly, the area of land needed to grow enough biomass to power the UK worked out to be roughly the same as the area of the UK. Similarly, we would need to cover all of the land of the UK with wind turbines if we were to power the country with them alone, and this still probably wouldn't be enough.

Overall this was a fascinating and useful lecture in how to see if an idea will work - an extremely useful tool for a product design engineer.