Industrial Design: From Math to Engineering



On October 23, Wellesley's Engineering Laboratory (We-Lab) hosted a talk by Sarah Reed, an employee of the consultant product design firm Farm, Inc. One of the things I enjoyed about her talk was that she brought a simple truth to light: you don't have to know you want to go into engineering to go into engineering. Set on becoming a math teacher, Reed graduated with a teaching degree and, quickly after she joined the workforce, decided that teaching was not what she wanted to do then. However, she did discover that she enjoyed woodwork and formed her own business, which gained a loyal customer basis. Hoping to expand it, Reed returned to graduate school in order gain the skills and certification needed for such manufacturing activities.

At first she looked into industrial design -- the study of how products are made and interact with people -- but such program require significant art background. That surprised me. Reed noted that engineers and industrial designers tend to work together often, but it had not occurred to me that there are programs for such. I thought engineering was the only way to do such things, when actually there are even more specialized persons in the business. She moved on to talk on a particular professor who was more product-design-oriented in the program: Professor Davis Wallis sought to resolve the surplus of cork within Guatemala by exploring the possibility of forming the turbine blades in wind mills from the material. Being the renewable-energy person I am, I found this incredibly interesting as I would love to participate in an engineering program that sough to solve real-world, applicable problems.

What was even more interesting was her discussion of her work at Farm and outlining the development of a Vascular Compression Controller to help reduce the risk of blood clotting in patients staying in hospital beds for long periods of time. She took the audience step-by-step into how every aspect of the product was made and the key stages in the process: from the ideation stage, pugh charts and proof of concept prototyping to mechanism development and human factors engineering to industrial design and GUI development, I had no idea of the breadth and depth of industrial designers' territory.

All in all, I found the seminar extremely helpful in introducing me to new areas of product design and engineering as well as in my own path towards becoming an engineer. Telling her personal path to where she is now enlightened me, as I became more aware of the many opportunities available for a person who wants to enter into the field.

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