- Professionals sketch and draw before attempting something like this. They know what they are going to do before they do it.
- How can you expect it *just to work itself out*?
- This is a disaster and I don't have time to erase it
- Why didn't you just stick to the small semblance of a plan you had?
- What made you think you could just get in the spirit of Van Gogh and "throw some paint"? Van Gogh didn't throw paint. He painted.
- This isn't working
- This is really bad. Really bad.
- Looks like a kid with an over-dose of Ritalin had a hey day with paint... and his drunk grandpa was trying to help here and there... and then some wild monkeys grabbed paint brushes
- How am I going to fix this?
- Why didn't I just plan it out?
- It's going to scare people
- Everything you do is a mess
- NASA should fire you
- You need process
- You are a crazed madman
- You need to start going to meetings and become part of planning things out
- You are too old for this nonsense
- You are unprofessional
- Real people know what they are doing and execute with precision
- Why do you take on this "creative persona". What you really are is a slob that doesn't want anybody telling you what to do.
- Who are you kidding? You can't get lucky forever.
- If somebody saw me right now with this painting, I'd be so embarrassed. How am I going to get it to a point today so that tomorrow they don't see this???
- I even heard "Billy Blazes" from the Rescue Heroes cartoon say, "Stick to the plan. Always stick to the plan. We stick to the plan."
But really, what a mess. But somehow, in the end, it's going to look like a sedate scene from an English Manor. That's funny.
5 comments:
Keith - What you described in this post and the next is what often happens to me with a new mechanical design. It used to cause so much stress, but somehow things/problems would always get worked out if I kept at it. It has happened so often now that I cautiously "expect" problems to get worked out over time. Glad everything worked out for you.
Robert - Thanks.
It would be fun to get your opinions on "process" in mechanical design. I'm sure you guys have a fairly rigorous process for some things. I had to attend a week long class on CMMI where the teacher began with the question, "Did Picasso have a process?" The answer was supposed to be "Yes. Of course! And Picasso optimized his process! He would have loved CMMI!" I think I argued with the guy for an entire week. BTW, I am not against process, process control and all that. I think that can be creative. Maybe it's something about the managerial measurement of ideation or something. I'm sure I'm wrong too if you were to match what I say with the strict definitions in CMMI.
For me, the rigor in mechanical design is just continuing to work on a solution until all of the details are worked out. Many times it is like running into a brick wall over and over until somehow I get through it (only sometimes to find another brick wall). It is not really a defined process for me. I think you need more of a process when many people are working on the same design. Most of what I do is alone, then my work gets critqued by a team. This works well for me. Most of what I am doing in mechanical design is identifying constraints and variables (geometric variables, material property variables; mechanical, thermal, and acoustic constraints), then iterating on the variables while reviewing the responses so as to stay within my constraints, then optimizing. Basically it is multi-variable optimization, where most of the variables are not continuous.
You sound like an engineer I'd support. I do simulation. Engineers simulate a system by writing math models and do monte carlo analysis of the systems variables/constraints. Some engineers are "controls" guys and understand this more. For a tutorial, I wrote an optimization deal based on a simplex method. Neat stuff. Most of the time, I'm not having that much fun though.
Post a Comment