The Tale of the Design of Sandwich

摘要

Assessing the artefacts of the previous century one could see pre- dominantly mechanical constructs, cleverly crafted to perform a task. A pantograph is one such example where the changing of the length ratio provides the required scaling to make a scaled replica of an object. Geneva Mechanisms provide intermittent rotations of various kinds derived from continuous rotations. A stepper motor now provides this function in a better and efficient way. While one sees the diminishing influence of the Geneva Mechanism with sadness from an academic point of view he will not fail to appreciate the enormous potential to provide fractional rotations unleashed by the stepper motor. New technologies are replacing the old ones at a very rapid pace. However the requirement for the function that prompted the original artefact remains. Often additional requirements, which were thought impossible with the old technology, are added to the list and provided by the modern versions of the old artefact. One can witness this effect clearly by comparing a camera from the 60’s to a modern digital camera. The question is ‘How to develop this new Version of the old artefact. This is an important question since a major part of the design work to be carried out in the foreseeable future would be developing newer versions of the old artefacts. We believe that the answer lies in adopting a systematic design methodology where the design process is broken into stages and where various design methods can be used to carry out tasks belonging to individual stages. We have identified five basic landmark stages in the design process.