Next Gen Ex 1 R2

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.