How has this experience (Internship) made you consider your college path that will ultimately lead to your career?
Well, a lot of this question can be answered when my mentor is brought into the picture. Jerome (my mentor) is not a singular expert in a singular thing, but rather proficient in many. This quality is one of the things that allowed him to take on almost all aspects of making a startup business, something I am very interested in as well. His advice on the matter is to learn as much as possible, and I see no better place to do that than college. As a result, this internship has altered my college plan/path in a way that will greatly diversify the classes I will be taking. The hope is that this method will make it easier for me to begin my own startup and ultimately, become successful. Consider what you have observed and learned about your mentor or other employees at your site, and reflect on your own academic & professional preparation. Working with my mentor, Jerome Lacote, has shed some light for me in two large ways. Working with him has revealed that while I am headed roughly on the right track to my goals with the entire jack-of-all-trades theme, I am definitely as far as I could be. I need to expand my rudimentary understandings of the various career paths I am involved in and get more integrated with the community and its vast amount of resources and connections.
1 Comment
For the past 4 weeks at Victorise, I have been working on the new casing for the upcoming EyeCo heads-up display. Using both design criteria and constant critique from my mentor, I went through 4 concepts, and between them, a little less than one hundred separate model versions. The three primary design criteria were: A. It had to fit the necessary hardware B. It had to look thin C. It had to fit within the most common place of application; the goggles. Below is a series of photos roughly going through the design process: I began by using this image as inspiration. It was created by another team member earlier and was an extremely rough render that only really met the first design criteria. While the battery and magnet/s were entirely out of scale, the model at least gave me an idea of what layout we were going for. This was the first concept I devised. It was a more solid and realistic edition of the model above and included design cues such as an ingrained Victorise logo and 'wings' for a quick rubber-band mounting solution. While this somewhat fit all the hardware, meeting the first requirement, I can't say that it met the latter. Feeling a need to have a fresh start and now being more adept at the CAD modeling software, I began again. This was the 2nd iteration of the EyeCo casing. It had a much more obvious focus on styling and was comprised almost entirely of curved contours. Although it fit all of the hardware with room to spare, the styling resulted in many useless features that only took up space and weight. However, even if I did remove said features, the weak attempt at meeting the third design constraint took up even more space. Adding the goggle curvature as an afterthought was not the way to go, obviously. Here, is the third installment concept of the EyeCo casing, this time purely as an experiment in design. This time around, I designed the entire casing around the curve of the goggles beforehand, then developed the interior features. This solution nicely met all 3 design constraints, however in this particular design, I did not take into account the length or height of the product. Because of this, the model was very thin, but also, abnormally long and tall. Feeling inspired by this new method of design, I went on to create the fourth and final EyeCo casing. This is the fourth version of the EyeCo casing and will be used in mass production. It takes inspiration from the third concept's contours and curved design and the edging found in early 2010's Apple products. My mentor and I both reviewed the design over and over, (about 37 versions were made) and agree that it meets all 3 constraints just well. It will also be easy to mass produce either by laser-resin printing or silicone molding and casting, so that is an added bonus. This project was important because whatever design I end up generating will ultimately be the face of the company in a way, as its flagship product. Noting this, my perfecting of it (in addition to the other functions) is essential to the success of the product launch. Below are some more fancy renders of the final version (04):
|