There’s little commitment while the design is still in my head. Anything can be changed in an instant.

There’s also little education. I don’t learn anything new from examining a design for the 23rd time. I might catch something based on a mistake I made in the past or other engineers might suggest improvements during an independent design review or impromptu brainstorming session. Everything we see in the design stems from what we already knew, and a few educated guesses.

Once I’ve put it all together in my mind and gotten input from my peers, the only way I can learn more is by building. Put it together, figure out the problems, make improvements. I created the design based on my experience, but the design is still changing. I’m sure I missed something

Maybe the first version isn’t perfect, but I can make it work. Test it. Find the flaws and make a list. Keep going. There’s more to learn.

I make improvements to this design and file away what I’ve learned for next time.

I build a second prototype. There’s more to learn.

• How can this be cleaned?
• Is it going to be dropped?
• What if someone sticks a finger in here?

As an engineer, it’s a good skill to have. But, is asking the right questions something that can be taught, or do you have to be born with this twisted skill?

If you’ve spent any time around young kids, you know that asking questions comes naturally. At that stage, “Why?” is one of the most common words in our vocabulary. We’re born with so many questions, and every answer simply creates more questions.

At some point, though, we have to refine this line of questioning, if only to get to sleep. Experience and intuition can help determine which answers are productive and which are just interesting. Draw the line. Give users some amount of responsibility, some amount of credit to their intelligence, and create some limit to the amount of abuse a product can take. Otherwise, the next handheld medical device will have a steel shell, cost ten times as much as it should, and take twice as long to get out the door.

Photo credit: arte_ram

Dr. Sarah Ballie, a veterinarian and computer scientist teaching at the Veterinary College of London, has developed a Virtual Haptic device to simulate the feeling of palpating a cow’s lower intestine. The benefits of this system aren’t limited to just the cows’ sense of dignity, either. By creating a virtual, computer-controlled environment, teachers have much better insight into what the students are doing inside the “animal”. They can objectively measure forces and tell a student how hard to push on something, or direct a student where to place a finger because they can see exactly where that finger is located.

While I look forward to the day when haptic technologies enrich our experience with our everyday devices, it’s nice to see that researchers are hard at work solving a problem that I will (hopefully) never experience. Current veterinarian students can also look forward to Dr. Ballie developing a Haptic Horse and a Haptic Cat in the near future. Surely, horses and cats will also be watching her work with interest.

Photo Credit: T. W. Vogel