Okay, welcome everyone to the engineering design process. Last week, we covered, oh, on the last video, we covered the design statement and defining your problem. What we're going to be moving on to now is the next step.
Once you have researched your problem, it is time to move on to defining your criteria and constraints. So we have... And constraints.
So, the criteria is what you want your design to be able to do. What the design is, what its purpose is. Your constraints are going to be your rules or limitations.
What's going to be limiting you and what you can and can't do. Now, this is essential in getting your design right. If you don't know your criteria and your constraints, you're going to have an issue when it comes to actually building your product. So, your criteria, once again, is going to be what you want to do.
And your constraints are going to be limits or rules. So what you're going to be limited by. Now, the more time you spend defining these two areas, the more you're going to be able to focus on your design and keep your ideas realistic. If you are having a hard time doing this, or hard time focusing on this, what you could do is think about a product. So if we go back to what we talked about in the previous video on the pet carrier, let's get some criteria and constraints for that project.
So our design statement on that one was to design and construct a carrier for a pet that will safely bring your pet to the vet. So criteria for what you want it to do. Another criteria for that might be how long is your pet going to be in there? So they might need food.
So to safely transport them, might need water and food. Also, when you're thinking about that, if you have an animal such as like a turtle or any other animal that breathes, it's going to need... Air. One of those things might be easily forgotten. For instance, if you have a fish, it doesn't need air.
It's going to need to be a sealed container with water. If you have a turtle, it's going to need air. Some constraints might be your materials.
So, for instance, once you start talking about materials, you might have something like cardboard, you might have wood if you have a wooden carrier, if you're trying to make a wooden one, and it could be metal. All depends on your materials that you're going to have at hand. So if you were making this design statement and you researched your product that you're going to be doing, you would start researching what materials you're going to need to accomplish that and you would get them. So that's going to be a constraint. It could be time.
So you might only have a certain amount of time to build it. So let's say you needed to get your pet to the vet by 4 o'clock, because that's when they're going to close. You need to know time and how long it will take.
Another one might be cost. So you need to know how much it's going to cost to build this. You don't want to start getting unrealistic and start saying, I'm going to make my pet carrier out of gold.
Ridiculous! You're not going to spend that much to bring your pet to the vet. So you want to think about how much money you're going to spend on creating this. So having this idea and having your constraints and your criteria is going to help you getting to the next steps of the design process, which we're going to talk about next, which is going to be the brainstorming process.
So once you start brainstorming your ideas, you need to think about your problem. Some of that research you did, your criteria, so what you want your design to do, what it has to do, and then your constraints. What's going to be your limit? So what materials are you going to be making it out of?
How much time do you have to build it? How much is it going to cost to build?