As a Mechanical Engineering student at the University of Toronto, I have been improving my personal understanding of engineering design through iteration in different courses throughout this year. This engineering design portfolio is going to illustrate the improvements of my understanding about engineering design as an engineering designer, which is going to be evidenced by the design projects I went through either on an individual or a group basis.

 

Before post-secondary education, my personal design experience was limited to some low-functionality product designs based on simple idea generation and basic problem-solving process, from which undoubtedly, those primary ideas resulted in some low-fidelity designs. Nevertheless, those previous low-fidelity design experiences opened the gate of high-level engineering design for me, and motivated my interests as an engineering designer.

 

After first year Engineering Science career, along with Prasix I and II,  my understanding as an engineering designer  has been evolving step by step through design activities in which I took part. Gradually, I realized that engineering design is not all about large projects like aircraft or hydropower design any more, instead, it is about changes. No matter how huge or small the changes are, as long as the changes make a little difference to ourselves, to people surrounding or the community, they are worth pursuing. By that time, the power of change has been motivating me to keep doing engineering design. 

 

Started from second year, the increasing number of Mechanical Engineering design projects provided me with numerous amount of  hands-on experiences, along with improvements in modelling, constructing and justification skills. Those design projects allow me to get involved in real design-case scenarios, consolidating my design iteration processes.  

 

Not only did all design activities benefit me growing my understanding as a future engineering designer, but also let me better identify a current self. As a hands-on, half-analytical half-expressive engineering student, my strength focuses on dealing with detailed designs with innovation.  My personal interests strongly lie on modelling, building, constructing and using software to solve practical problems. 

 

However, my future development will focus more on problem framing. This is an important skill, which requires reasonable arguments and critical thinking ability. In addition, I will be practicing more research skills, which will result in dramatic increase of working efficiency as an engineering designer. 

 

More reflection on personal design process and projects/artifacts will be displayed in later sections in the portfolio.