Design Sense:

The entire design portion of CAD can basically be summed up with one term: Design Sense. It's a term I came up with after the monstrosity of a season we had in 2023. Here what Sophomore me had to say about it (copied from the 2023 recap):

"We didn’t know what parts to use to create what we thought of. We didn’t know how to attach the parts or if there would be any interference with them. There were just so many unknowns when we were cadding the robot up that we just assumed things would work out until we actually saw the problem when mechanical asked us questions about the model. I like to call this skill “Design sense,” which is the ability to understand how a part works and manipulate the part to attach to anything. We were heavily lacking in that category, and I think in large part it had to do with the fact that me and Arya were both first-year leads in CAD."

Now that I'm more experienced I have a better definition. It involves these 4 basic principles in the design world:

• Design Thinking: This is a problem-solving approach that focuses on understanding design constraints, brainstorming solutions, and creating efficient, constraint-centered designs.

• Systems Thinking: This involves considering all the interconnected parts of a system and how they influence one another. It's about seeing the "big picture" and anticipating how changes in one area will impact the rest.

• Strategic Planning: This involves setting goals, collaboration, and planning steps carefully to ensure efficient use of time and resources while accounting for potential challenges.

• Engineering Design Process: This refers to the iterative approach of planning, designing, testing, and refining solutions to a problem.

Design sense refers to the ability for a person to effectively combine these 4 skills. In other words,

Design sense is the skill to effectively design a solution to a given problem by accounting for all possible external influences.

While your reading these docs, keep in mind that each lesson is designed to help you understand more about each one of these principles. However, combining them all together is something that I believe only comes with experience. The more you design, the more mistakes you make—the more you'll begin to understand the difficulty in combining these principles together. As you get better overtime, the goal is to be able to perfect your skills in all 4.