Below, find a showcase of design projects I have been a part of through career as a student Engineer, and other projects I have developed independently. Some projects highlighted on this page were done as part of a team; as such, where necessary, I have highlighted my own contributions. Click the links in or the title of each section to read in more detail.
CIV102: Structures and Materials - An Introduction to Engineering Design is an Engineering Science student's first foray into Structural and Civil Engineering. Beginning with the basic theories of stress and strain, and moving through to design of truss bridges, box girders, and finally reinforced concrete, the course gave me a greater awareness and appreciation for the infrastructure I interact with on a daily basis. This course was my first experience with true Engineering "design", where we began to blend project requirements with theory on how to turn ideas into reality in a safe and responsible manner. This is also where I began to develop ideas and practices that would turn into my personal design process.
The first team project of the course was the design of a truss bridge, intended to replace a bridge of our choice in downtown Toronto. My team identified the CityPlace Puente de Luz bridge over the Front St. W rail corridor as the bridge we would be "replacing". To read more about our process and results, click here.
The second team project involved the design and construction of a box girder bridge. The bridge, which had to be over 1 m in length, was to be constructed out of a fixed quantity of Matboard and contact cement. The bridge had to span a "valley" supported by two columns (which were not symmetrically supporting the bridge), and need to support a three-car 900 N (90 kg or ~200 lbs) train which was driven over it. The bridge was then loaded to failure in the structures lab at U of T. The process first involved designing a number of cross-sections for the bridge (since the loading was non-symmetrical) to maximize failure load, optimizing how we could get the required pieces out of our [very] limited supply of materials, and finally constructing the bridge. To read into the details, click here.
In Phase II of Praxis I, we started from the beginning of the general design process, with the goal of progressing towards the mid to late stages. We began by identifying an opportunity with a service provider on the University of Toronto campus, wrote a Design Brief for the opportunity, and practiced interacting with stakeholders to develop a set of requirements and objectives for solutions. We finished in the early stages of prototyping and validation of concepts. This was my first opportunity to practice interacting with stakeholders, and we learned the importance of getting out and visiting those you're working with early on. We also learned the importance of using engineering tools effectively to generate ideas, and help guide our process. For more details, head into the story by clicking here.
The culminating task of Praxis II was to work with a community selected by our team, identified in one of eight RFPs. By this point, my personal design process was fully developed, and I was able to draw from it throughout the project. The project took us through the first three phases of my design process; analysis, exploration, and iteration. I learned the importance of interacting with stakeholders early to get a better understanding for their needs, to influence our design decisions. We practiced generating as many solutions as possible, converging down to those we thought best met the objectives, then iterating on those to improve it. Towards the end, we began to move into Phase 4: Execute. We presented our design to the owner of G&38S Dye, the store we were working with, to his (and our) satisfaction. We also successfully presented and defended our solution at the Praxis II showcase, and are confident we could implement our design with some modifications. To read more about the journey and process, click here.
A web application where the user can create servers for counting things. Supports multiple servers, live updates, pause intervals, and more! This application is still a work in progress, but was my platform to learn Node.js and socket.io. It can be found here.
Webnotes is a web implementation of the Windows (7) Sticky Notes app. It was an early playground for me to learn jQuery and jQuery UI, and later to practice object-oriented JavaScript. It is a great example of my iterative design process, as I have fully rewritten the code base at least 3 times as I gained more skills. It currently supports making / deleting notes, resizing notes, and importing / exporting notes manually. In the future, I plan to make notes save to the user's cookies, and eventually implement a server for saving notes. I initially paused development when I decided I needed to learn PHP to do the server-side portion, which led me to developing the Botnak global namefaces server instead.