All right,
this is the lantern I used to use when I was a boy scout.
It's a candle.
That's kind of dangerous to light a candle in your tent.
But it's a really cool light.
OK,
so now that we have the lights on,
we are actually talking about lanterns,
not the
candle version of this,
but
the battery-operated backpacking lanterns like this one,
that you would hang from your tent, and we're going
to use this as an example of Next Generation Design
and how we ultimately go from
something like this
to something like
this.
All right,
so now jumping into small presentation, I want to give you here, you can see
that
on the left we have the representation of
what we'll call the current generation,
even though this is actually pretty old now,
but for the purpose of this illustration, we'll imagine
this to be the current iteration of the current generation.
And if tasked with the responsibility of
coming up with the next generation design,
one
would start the process
of
understanding
who uses this,
how it gets used,
and
go through the ideation process,
make some choices,
get some CAD work stuff done,
until
you ultimately end up at what is a final next gen design,
which is like this one.
And the purpose of this
video is for us
to
take you through the first portions of this.
Well,
we'll go all the way to the CAD portion,
but
we're gonna go through the first portions of this,
and I'm gonna show you how much time I spent on each part
and hopefully from this you can walk away with a sense of what to do,
number one,
and then also the kind of discipline
that is required to stick with it and not let it take too much
of your time.
All right,
so as I began this project and I want you to actually know
that the data that I'm about to show you is 100% real,
it is what I did for this project to go literally from what we see on
the left hand side of the video to the right hand side of the video,
which ultimately took about 25
hours,
maybe a little bit less,
but nevertheless it was around that amount.
All right,
so as I started to think
about
lantern and my experience with lanterns and just sort of the ideas of
what lanterns are all about.
I often find myself pulling out a piece of paper
and just sketching.
I started right over in this area,
2D sketches of
blocks with buttons and shiny glassy domes
that were on there.
And proceeded through generating a bunch of ideas
that ranged all the way to circular hanging globes
to things that looked more traditional to what we
already know
about the Brunton lantern for backpacking.
What's
going on in my head while I'm working on this?
This is about a 20-minute sketch.
I just was thinking and pondering and wondering what it would be like
to use one of these lanterns. And as you're doing these sketches,
it's super valuable in my perspective
because you're starting to think,
OK,
well it's got to be turned on,
it's gotta
sit stable on the ground,
it's got to hang somewhere, it's got to have a portion where light comes through,
it's got to have a portion where batteries are stored.
And these kinds of things rush through my mind while I'm sketching.
You could think of this even though this is a good sketch.
You could think of this a bit
as like a doodling in the sense that
I'm just sort of thinking and thinking about the product
and the
experience that someone might have with the product.
This,
like
I said it's about 20 minutes of just sort of thinking through the process, and I
did that. I'm gonna say before I really started
the design process while I was thinking about what
sort of product would I want to do for the next gen project.
Alright,
so now we need to put this,
however,
into the context of the basic design process
which we see right here,
and we have five major parts to the basic design process.
The first thing we have to do is really understand the need,
the
need for a next-generation product or the need for a
next
different kind of lantern.
After we understand those needs,
we jump into an exploration phase
where we start to look at a lot of different ideas.
I'm gonna show you some other ideation,
not just what we saw on the previous page,
but
some other ones coming up here in just a little bit
that represent a kind of accelerated fast-paced concept generation.
We
then make a bunch of decisions and we call this
the defined portion of the design process where we're actually defining out
what's the shape gonna actually be,
what are the features we're gonna add.
We're making decisions.
This is a real big decision
time right here,
OK?
And then what we do is we go and we test the design.
Now if we're
outside of the CAD system,
and of course this is a CAD course,
so we're not really outside the CAD system.
But if we're outside the CAD system,
we are literally testing the product with people
or we're dropping it and seeing if it breaks and we're testing it physically.
But we can still do this step within the CAD system,
and then what we do is
we take a hard look at what we're creating,
and we ask ourselves if we think it's any good.
And we even show other people,
and
get feedback from them.
And then, of course, we often need to
refine.
Each of these steps is gonna have to be returned to
at some point because
we will do it in a preliminary way first and then we will go and we will iterate
and we will do a more refined round
through these and hopefully we'll go through a couple
of rounds while we try to improve the design.
So, what I'm gonna do now is talk to you about
how I actually approached this one evening,
the
first thing I did was I sat down and I made a plan.
You can see down here at the bottom, it was 7:28 p.m. when I started this.
That's not my most effective time of the day,
but that's when I had time to do it.
The first thing I did was I planned,
OK?
I said I want to do the two first parts,
the first two parts of the basic design process.
I wanted to try to understand and explore.
And during this time at this evening,
this is what I wanted to do.
I also wanted to get the CAD strategies together
and I only wanted to spend 2 hours.
And because I've gone through this kind of thing enough in my life,
I knew that if it was gonna take me 2 hours,
I would have to make a plan that would be a 1-hour plan
because it would take me twice as long as I think it's gonna take me
to get the thing done.
So, I listed out the actions that I was going to take.
I was gonna look at the parts that I had because I have a couple
of backpacking lanterns like this one and like the candle that I showed you earlier.
I was then gonna go online and look at reviews
if I could find any reviews for this particular lantern.
Then I was going to take some pictures of the
parts that I had
and do some sketches for the next generation ideas,
choose a concept and then make strategies for making those parts.
Now,
I
dedicated a certain amount of time
to each of these which I've written and read
and I forced myself to stay to those times,
at least I tried,
OK?
So,
let's
go on and see what happens.
So now,
after about 10 minutes,
I don't know,
5 minutes,
10 minutes,
whatever,
I have,
gathered
up the lanterns that I have.
I have looked at them
and I have taken some pictures.
I took
one of them apart
to look at the major pieces that were in there.
Now,
clearly you might not have the object that you've chosen for next generation,
but within the next-generation project descriptions,
I've found a product teardown or a decomposition
online and given it to you where you can basically look at this kind of stuff
to see what's going on. But I didn't have that for the lantern,
so I had one and I took it apart.
And these are the major pieces that were in there,
turns out there's 32 pieces,
I took pictures of them.
Then I went online
and did some searching
and I did some searching for mostly
customer reviews of the exact product that I'm
trying to create a next generation for.
All right,
so I did find some,
even though it's a somewhat old lantern.
I
did find some
and I found a lot of really good things in
there.
And
I'm going to not say anything really about this.
I'm going to summarize it in just a minute,
OK?
But
we did
see
things like
the legs are a little bit flimsy.
I should actually say the way that this particular design works
is that in order to sort of not have it tip over,
there are these legs that deploy,
like this is actually
kind of cool at first sight.
But
as you work a little bit more with this,
you realize it doesn't actually do very much
and
so
yeah,
plus people online are basically
saying some similar things about this.
So, that's a clue
that those are things that I was gonna
work on.
So, I'm about 20 minutes into the design process at this point,
OK?
And what have I learned so far?
I've learned that the feet are odd,
but the size is good.
I also learned from the reviews that
it breaks
if you drop it.
And it breaks right at the
connection right here.
And frankly,
I have a couple of these and one is
broken right there and then it's super glued together,
OK?
The
button can also get pushed while it's in the pack,
which is disastrous
because you really don't want to be carrying extra batteries,
and
to have the thing stay on in your backpack during the day,
that's,
that's horrible,
OK?
So,
then I listed out some things to keep and some things to change,
some things to keep,
want to keep the gray,
red,
dark gray color scheme,
want to keep the inverted dome.
There's a thing on the inside of this where
the light shines up and then it's pushed down,
that's an inverted dome.
We want to keep that that basic working principle.
Wanted
to keep a hook or a loop on the top
because it's got to hang from a tent on the inside of a tent somewhere.
OK.
We wanted to keep a general cylindrical shape and not like a cuboid or a rectangular
prism
like I showed in some of my hand sketches earlier,
and we want to take the same battery strategy.
And what is that battery strategy?
It's that
there's basically a carrier for four AA batteries.
I think those are AA batteries.
You have four AA batteries and it just slides in the end
and we wanted to keep that same basic strategy.
We're not even gonna try to change that piece
at all,
OK?
Some
things to change,
we want to change the feet,
change the robustness of the globe,
change the hook
loop
thing,
OK?
We want to change the button and get some button protection in there,
possibly change the base shape.
So, I'm about a half hour into the project by the time we're done with this list.
And I find myself doing a little bit of ideation
and in that ideation,
I started thinking a lot about these legs
and how we could make these legs more effective.
And so, we get a little bit of mechanical design in here
where I'm thinking about the tip over and where the center
of mass is and what the overall base size is.
And ultimately
I draw a couple of pictures as you can see right here.
I take a photo and then draw right on top of
those pictures trying to establish how big my legs could get
and how much benefit it would give me if I did that.
And under the worst case scenario where it tips at the
closest to the center portion,
which is right in here,
OK,
we actually don't get very much from these legs,
and that was just learned from that mechanical study.
All right,
well,
I also did some other sketches then where I'm thinking
I'm just gonna go for some sort of base that
ultimately gives me similar protection but without the mechanics of the
articulating arms or the deploying arms.
I do a bunch of brainstorming on what I want to do at the top
and there's a couple of things going on here.
One,
I want to get a loop in there
which already exists,
but I actually want to get a loop that opens
so that I can just loop around a loop that's already in the top
of the tent and not have to have another string hanging off of it.
And I got a couple of options that are coming from this.
There's also another thing going on here which you can see here in the front.
One
of the things that I wanted to improve was to make the lantern more obviously
turn on-able when it was dark.
And so, I
want people to grab it in their hands and feel by the shape of the object
where the front is because on the front they're going to find the button.
And so, I've given some features on the next generation design that has that
such as this thing that's right up here.
Now
you can see I've sketched right on top of some photos.
I'm trying to be as fast as I can in my exploration here.
So, I'm an hour in
at this point in the project
and I've already identified things that I want to change,
and that's pretty
good.
Also
wanting to change the shape and freshen it up a bit
because it looks
old and not very interesting,
so,
yeah,
then
I spend about
40 minutes,
creating
two good sketches,
and these two good sketches are
guiding me
to where I want to go. And I've sort of gotten enough information now
that I can start thinking about the parts and I can
start thinking about how I'm gonna model those parts. And so,
that's what I've got going on here, you can see I'm thinking I'm gonna
do a revolve down here and stick a logo on here and do a revolve.
I don't know why I thought I was going to do a revolve for a button.
Surely, it's
circular,
but
behind it is not circular.
I did not use a revolve on this,
but I thought I was going to.
Then I got some revolves and some cuts.
There's a bunch of revolves in this whole thing,
OK,
plus some sweeps over here.
All right,
so then with this I could jump right into getting my CAD strategies,
which is exactly what I did.
I made this CAD strategies for these 11 parts,
and,
although
I won't go into all of them,
I will go into one of them,
just
to show you kind of how the CAD strategy was because
it takes some diligence to like crunch through it and
like stick with it and make the CAD strategies.
It can be quite tempting to want to skip this part,
OK?
But
it's useful to do this because once you get into the CAD system,
it's like you already know what to do,
OK?
So, this is for the center hub.
I wanted to make a profile for a revolve,
which I did right here.
I made a profile for a revolve,
and
then revolved it,
which is what this arrow is sort of representing here.
OK.
Then I made two cut outs,
one for the button
and
or
I just made a cut out for the button,
OK,
which is here.
And then I made three holes for the screws which are in the top
and I just made one and then patterned it around.
So,
what
have we got going on here?
We have
been about 2.5 hours.
I wanted to only spend 2 hours.
OK,
look,
I guess I'm showing you all the strategies that I made.
I wasn't planning to do that or I guess I just didn't think to turn off these slides.
So,
I
did in fact make all these strategies and
it
was a little bit painful because
I was kind of done with working on it at this point.
It was 2.5 hours
in,
but
what I did was then took those strategies,
not on this day,
it was on a different day.
I then went into the CAD system
and
made all those parts the way my strategy said,
and I put them together.
And what do you suspect happened when I put them together?
Well,
this is what happened.
I got a lantern
that like kind of had the right parts,
but didn't it all look
like the kind of lantern I envisioned in my head.
It was close,
but it definitely wasn't top notch.
You know,
Brunton styling and it just looked underdeveloped,
which is exactly what it was,
it was underdeveloped.
What happens is this, it just happens all the time like this in the design process.
The very first model that you put together will not be beautiful.
It will be your first version.
And the sooner you can get to the first version of your design,
the more successful you will be in this project.
Why?
Because once you have the first version.
You can start seeing what the actual problems are
and you can start making improvements to fix them.
So, after,
I
don't know.
I'm gonna say probably 5 or 6 more hours of CAD work at this point
got to this version of the design.
Now this version of the design is feeling more professional.
It's feeling more
like styled,
it's broken up into its pieces.
What
we have on this version,
which we did before was just a revolve of sort of
the right
kinds of sizes and right kinds of pieces and the parts are chunked together,
but
over here
we see that we have really improved this.
We've increased the size of this diameter,
put a nice reveal between them so we can see it nicely.
We
have got some protection for the button,
which is one of the things we wanted.
The button here is recessed.
We have this front
piece right here which is a representation of where's the front
as well as the thing that's going on up here,
which is a representation of the front.
And then we have this part that unscrews where the battery
goes.
So, we can see a little bit deeper here into the product and what we ended up with
at the very end or what I should say I ended up with at the very end.
You
can see all the parts,
the foot pads,
the bottom that screws into here,
the battery box goes right into here.
OK,
and I just got the batteries right off of GrabCAD
because there was no need for me to remake those batteries
and it's quite likely I got the standard box off of that.
Yes,
it says here online CAD database.
I got my logo on there in the same sort of place as previous generations.
I've kept the
gray,
light gray,
dark gray, red coloring scheme here.
I've got a circuit board with the light with the reflectors with the glass globe,
which is not glass it's actually plastic
with the inverted dome
in my top and then this other part that's up here.
So,
this is how I went.
This
is how I went from wanting to do a next-generation design like this one.
And ending up at this,
which I believe is a pretty good-looking design that is well designed out,
and
how the first couple of hours went on that.
We went right through the design process,
you know,
trying to understand what was going on by looking at the user reviews,
generating some ideas,
choosing some ideas, and making decisions,
that's such a critical part of this whole thing.
Making some decisions
and then
banging out the CAD to get the first version of my CAD as early as possible,
which was this one,
so that I could spend the
next
you know,
I don't know,
12 hours maybe on the project,
even more I think,
maybe
15 hours I getting a good second revision and then finally ending up at a good
third or fourth revision that has been refined.
All right,
that
is
all I wanted to go over today relative to the Brunton project,
excuse me,
the next-generation project of which I have
demonstrated this with the Brunton Backpacking lantern.
But I do want to just say one more thing about projects like this
and everyone experiences this,
me included,
OK?
And that is that
there is
a time that progresses in this direction
and there is your love for what you're working on in this direction
and at the beginning of any project
there is a level of excitement
that soon drops off because of all the work that needs to be done,
and then the problems that are faced.
And then you end up in the pit of despair
and that pit of despair is tough to be in
because you don't like the project anymore, you
wish you weren't working on it anymore,
but I can tell you having done this hundreds
of times and not just with CAD-related things
or product development related things.
When you're here
you got to keep going because you're so close
to the point where you are going to be very proud of what you
created.
All right,
I think you should get started following a
method that's pretty close to what I did here
where you force yourself
to stick to a tight
deadline
and get your first model as soon
as possible.