Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Communication Mechanics Episode 5: Communicating Senior Design Projects - Lessons from Capstone Winners with Mechkiwis, Part 2
36 Plays7 months ago
In Part 2 of the final episode of Season 1 of the podcast, Dr. Jill Fennell speaks to three members of the team that won in the category of Best Mechanical Engineering Project at the Spring 2024 Capstone Engineering Expo, the Mechkiwis. Seniors Isabelle Gustafson, Miguel Daly, and Sana Hafeez share the experience they and their fellow teammates - Claudia Vitale, Lena Moller, and Maxwell Gart - had creating communication materials for their project and designing a successful expo presentation.
Shownotes and Timestamps:
- 01:11 Third category: Innovative nature of the team’s solution
- 09:38 Fourth category: Presentation energy at the Expo
- 13:01 Team’s delivery during pitch and how it contributes to audience investment
- 16:40 Presentations and matching the energy levels between presenter and audience
- 23:09 Unexpected challenges or successes
- 27:48 Advice and Tips for future presenters and engineering students
- 29:46 Wrap up and outro
Thanks for listening to season 1 of the podcast. Season 2 will begin in early 2025.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Communication Mechanics'
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome to Communication Mechanics. I'm Jill Fennell, the Frank K Webb Chair in Communication Skills at Georgia Tech's Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. In each episode, we'll explore how communication shapes the success of engineers, researchers, and industry professionals.
Target Audience and Topics
00:00:28
Speaker
Join us as we share stories of triumphs, challenges, and the strategies that fuel success.
00:00:34
Speaker
Whether you're a seasoned pro, an aspiring student, or simply passionate about engineering, listen as we demystify compelling communication in the world of mechanical engineering.
00:00:54
Speaker
Today, we'll start the second part of our two-part episode and finish out with the team McKee-wees.
Articulating Problems and Solutions
00:01:10
Speaker
So you have to tell us what your problem is. Tell us that you solved the problem. And then finally, you know if you want to win, you have to say how your solution was innovative, how it takes it to the next level. Did your team's perspective on why your solution was innovative? Did your team's perspective on why your solution was innovative evolve over time or was it pretty clear early on?
Innovative Design: The Retractor Handle
00:01:37
Speaker
I thought it was pretty clear early on because Max and I were directly involved in manufacturing these retractor sets at the invention studio. And we knew from research that our team member, Lana Mahler, who designed the handles for two of our retractors had done something that had never been done before on any retractor that we had found in all of our background research.
00:02:03
Speaker
Right now all the retractors that we found have handles that look like hooks or they simply don't have a handle just a flat piece of metal. yeah And also that the edges are really sharp and if you hold them the wrong way they could cut your hand while you're holding them which is not good. And so basically Leonard's design took the metal rolled it into a cylinder that's very easy to grip very easy to hold.
00:02:25
Speaker
And when we did our second round of presentations in class with our professor Dr.
Renaming and Creativity in Design
00:02:32
Speaker
Jerry Walla, he looked at our poster and saw not just those two retractors that had the brand new original handle, but also the other three.
00:02:43
Speaker
the ones like the angled brown retractor which is called the angled brown because it is primarily based on the brown deltoid retractor which is one of the standard retractors. We did have to make a very creative decision when presenting the creativity behind our design at Expo throughout the whole semester we had called the angled brown the angled brown because it made the most direct sense to somebody who designed the tool it was just the brown but angled in a different way to be less damaging and easier to hold which is a very good improvement on the original design but if you were showing this to a judge they would look at that and be like oh it's just another brown that's not very creative
00:03:26
Speaker
And so we renamed the angled brown during Expo and we called it the angled scoop retractor. So now it had no reference to the original design and although on the poster people could see the original brown and they saw the angled brown, when we renamed it suddenly people weren't recognizing the similarities as easily.
00:03:47
Speaker
Yeah I think we spent a lot of time in our prep going between what was the five point and I don't remember if the three point was the next down but whatever that second point B was in terms of the difference of having something completely new and I believe the wording was something along the lines of like redesigning Yeah, we have the rubric
Achieving High Rubric Scores
00:04:05
Speaker
in front of us. So you get five total points possible. And halfway is reapplication or recombination of an existing solution. But if you want five, it needs to be original and not obvious. So while while there were several retractors that were based on the old one simply because of the function they serve. So for example, the the brown retractor um or the angled scoop in the end, you know, ours and the old one, the job of it is to to lift up the humeral head along with another retractor. And so it ah has that scoop to do that. But we made the intentional choice to focus in our presentation on the things that we knew were completely new and also the most impactful and innovative to our application.
00:04:52
Speaker
to really aim for that five point rather than the three point. And so those two things, like Miguel mentioned, were the rolled handle and then really the airplane retractor. The tool head was completely new. It was not based on anything done previously in retractors. And it also replaced two retractors for one, which is a really big deal in terms of um hands available during surgery because lots of medical centers only have a surgeon and an assistant.
Design Choices and Presentation Strategies
00:05:14
Speaker
And so needing more than four hands gets really complicated really quickly. So while we had things like the rolled bank card,
00:05:21
Speaker
which we presented as the canine retractor, which, you know, the tip, it's the same as the bank car, but the handle is different. the The focus was on how in our project did we make completely new things, and even if some of our solutions were things that, you know, you don't need to reinvent the wheel if the wheel works well, and that was the case in a couple retractors, but in lots of them, they're working these completely new ideas, and so emphasizing and focusing on that area was something we made a very intentional choice to do.
00:05:47
Speaker
Right, we had to be careful with how we talked about it to the audience, because at the end of the day, this is supposed to be used with tools that already exist, that are already called retractors, that already have like similar purposes, and we just had to make a very good argument for what we did was new, it was important, and Here's how we did it. Yeah. And even for those reapplications, like for example using the angled brown, angled scoop, whatever you want to call it, one of the photos that you saw with the difference in exposure, you can see the massive difference in the head size of the original brown versus our new angled scoop, angled brown. And so while the form factor didn't necessarily change, it's a scoop, the angle did change.
00:06:30
Speaker
um the size of it also changed and so really being being intentional about understanding just because it might be drawing inspiration or based on something it's not necessarily a reapplication or recombination but what did we do from our creativity that was new and not obvious from to the original designers of retractors and so yeah That's a really interesting sort of divide you had to straddle there because you're a client and the people who would use these tools, doctors, don't want to have to be retrained on how to do shoulder surgery to use this new tool no one's ever heard of before.
Balancing Innovation and Familiarity
00:07:06
Speaker
On the other hand, you're being asked by the judges, and because this is an expo, and expos are about innovation and leading the way, you want to seem very innovative. So I find it really interesting how you guys
00:07:20
Speaker
picked up on the way that you frame what it is that you're talking about will control the way that your audience perceives it, which was really cool. Yeah, surgeons have people to look at what they needed to use for the tool. They have to understand, oh yeah, if I'm going to use the English Skipper tractor, I know exactly when I would put it in. It needs to make sense to them and just be intuitive for their use.
00:07:44
Speaker
The one interesting thing about that point you mentioned of them knowing how to use it, we actually had the Y and the U retractors, which are both used for the same thing. They're both for the glenoid nexus at the end. So you don't use both. You could have one or the other, or if you use them interchangeably, depending on what you prefer. And the reason we left both of these in our final solution is that is because we realized that surgeons that might have more experience or more exposure to this type of surgery preferred the Y because they could see. You can move the tool around more easily. It was a much smaller tool. It could hold the um one bone back while pushing another out of the way. And they loved the maneuverability they had with it, but it had a higher learning curve.
00:08:30
Speaker
Yeah, and the U does the same thing in terms of pushing the bone back, but it's even though it's still completely new, it's much more similar to what they might expect to see in this situation. And so it made a little bit more intuitive sense. and So providing both those options that both provide better exposure, but then it's really catered to your choice
Importance of Feedback and Practice
00:08:50
Speaker
and that learning curve was was actually something that was considered as well. yeah are the surgeons who we got the opportunities to work with. One of them preferred the Y, the other one preferred the U, just because the U had the rolled handle and it was shaped like a wrench. Yeah, one of the biggest points we talked about during Expo is that they didn't ask a biomedical engineering team to do this project. They asked mechanical engineers, and a big reason for that is because they knew we want to have the bias that comes with a medical background.
00:09:21
Speaker
we looked at these as if they were tools being used by engineers. And so that's why some of our designs do look like a wrench because we use wrenches and we know what it feels like to hold a comfortable wrench for a long time. That really influenced our design. Nice. Okay, so we're almost through the rubric because we talked about that this is a problem with solving. We heard about your solution. He told us why this was innovative. The last category is presentation energy.
00:09:50
Speaker
And I think ener energy is one of the most difficult aspects to get right. You definitely don't want to come across as the stereotype of the cheesy or overeager used car salesman, but you don't want to appear as if you're bored or like pretentious, like you don't really want to talk to the audience either. but How did your team go about curating the energy or feeling that you wanted to bring to your audience? I think the word we ended up trying to frame ourselves as was authentic.
00:10:16
Speaker
Like, we need what we want it to do, we need what we want it to convey, but part of our earlier pitch practices, we had a lot of buzzwords in it that we almost entirely removed because it did feel very Salesman-y, right? And just trying to find the line of, we're excited to be here, we're proud of the work that we did, and we want you to understand why we care about this project.
00:10:42
Speaker
helped us more when we approached it from that angle. We did make a lot of changes when taking art pitches from written form to spoken form. We noticed that a lot of us do have different styles of speaking in words on paper than coming out of our mouth. And so but that's why we spent most of that day practicing our pitches in front of each other. There were a lot of things that we tweaked, a lot of phrases that felt awkward or off that we wanted to change before the expo. So we sounded authentic.
00:11:11
Speaker
not like we're trying to sell you something like sincere with what we wanted to do yeah and i think even though it's not in the talking necessarily i think something that really helped and we've mentioned the physical you know both our iterations of prototypes of the retractors and the shoulders that you could show them on i think having those things to show people to hold people to use in your discussion automatically makes them feel you feel more connected and invested rather than just talking at someone and so not only does it help them visualize things but i so I also think it helps the presenter to connect better with the person you're talking to and so I think that that also really helped a lot in terms of
00:11:51
Speaker
um ah In terms of that we also got a lot of feedback at least me personally in terms of slowing down um Making sure that it we had a lot of information um and there's a lot to convey to people But if we can hit the high level big points, they'll still get the same takeaway and it feels much better better and like something used the word sincere to do that in a non rushed v manner because that's not enjoyable to listen to.
Engagement Through Sincerity and Passion
00:12:22
Speaker
I think sincere is a great word to think about it because
00:12:26
Speaker
You don't want to come across as cheesy, right? And and whenever we talk about having presentation energy, likere we're not trying to encourage students to be cheesy and and over at the top. But I think Sincere is great, because you've spent so much time working on this, you obviously care about it. And I want you to make me care the way that you care. I want your care of this project to be infectious. And I do think that your team did a really good job of um infecting your audience with that that sincerity of how much you care about this project and are genuinely excited about the project. As you were pitching, could you see how your team's delivery contributed to audience investment?
00:13:07
Speaker
I think so. My favorite parts were when I was talking to someone. When I got to a point that I knew was cool, at least cool to me, like really cool to me, you could also see they were like, shoot, that's cool too. So it might've been a combination of me right thinking it was cool, but also you know obviously the content of of the poster and and our project. But I think you started off a bit, okay, what's this project, what's going on? And I think by the time you got jumped pretty quickly to the end of that prototyping. They're like, man, they made these, they work, that's cool. And and I think you could see that progression of investment in people. And I think that i think it was actually really good for us that a lot of our ah judges, we at least we think, we don't really necessarily know, came towards the second half of Expo because I think we had gotten used to then at that point
00:13:56
Speaker
working with the people who had walked by and seeing that progression going okay if we can see it and then we know we're doing something right here and giving us the confidence to then move forward the first half of the expo we got like the jitters out and um i remember like as we were talking to like visitors who like you know we were like we were friends with like you know they came to stop by to show our support like our parents came by and Isabel's parents was actually like filming everyone giving a pitch and it was the cutest thing ever because I could feel myself when I was speaking to someone like the way like my like smile would grow or like go smile at different parts that I was personally excited about but then like seeing it on video my like grin was like my entire face because I just thought it was the coolest thing ever
00:14:41
Speaker
that we went to the lab, or that Max and Miguel got to use a blowtorch.
Interactive Prototypes for Understanding
00:14:45
Speaker
We got to use a blowtorch for our project. That was a fun part. I think something else that was kind of apparent to me when I was presenting at the Expo is that there were some people who were not immediately drawn in when you give them your initial pitch. Maybe you explain to them your project and how you solved the problem and they're not completely sold or convinced or is starstruck, and then you ask them,
00:15:09
Speaker
would you like to use our retractors on these bones right here and then suddenly their eyes open and they're looking at the table and they see all our tools laid out in our 3D printed shoulder joint model and then I hand them the tool and they do the movement that the surgeon does and then suddenly it clicks for them and they're like oh that's actually pretty cool And then they see the video of Maxi manufacturing these prototypes and understanding what it means to water jet something and bend it and why that's actually easier than welding or machining something on a mill. And for a lot of different people that I talked to, the presentation didn't really click until they interacted with our props.
00:15:51
Speaker
I think something that the three of us will forget from time to time just from being at the invention studio is that the level of like hands-on work that we do just in our personal projects is very very left field for anyone who is not a part of the invention studio like we'll go like oh yeah I'm in a Steel Rose today or I'm in an electric guitar and If I'm talking to another volunteer at the invention studio, we just kind of like be like, that's cool, how'd you do it? And we'll move on with like the rest of our day. Whereas that kind of response kind of stops other people in the track, in their tracks. So really showing that prototyping process, just knowing that it was an unfamiliar experience with their people really helped immerse them into what we were trying to do.
Reflecting Energy and Enthusiasm
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think something that a lot of people don't realize is whatever feeling you bring to your presentation or any of your communication interactions is the feeling that your audience is most likely going to adopt. And it's just because we're human beings, and that's the way that we're wired and mirror neuron processing. When you smile at a baby, it starts to smile back. And so if I'm going up to a presentation and someone seems nervous or unconfident, then their presentation is going to come across as unconfident or unfinished or unpolished in some way. Or if I come up to someone's presentation and they seem annoyed at me because I don't understand some engineering terms, then I'm going to think, well, this wasn't for me. I'm not meant to be here. Whenever an expo, everyone's meant to be there. And as the people who are engineers, you guys get to create new information that never existed before.
00:17:33
Speaker
And if you can't communicate that to other people, then sadly that information will die with you. And so I just loved that your presentation had this really great energy that felt as if I was supposed to be a part of it.
00:17:48
Speaker
i I just love talking to people. I think that's something that we, it not saying you have to be outgoing to to be a good presenter because I definitely, I mean this is a little bit off track, but in my personal life I feel more introverted than extroverted so you don't need to be an extrovert, but I think just making an intentional effort to convey your investment and excitement and something or just genuinely being invested and excited about something. i You can make anybody excited about anything. I had this girl talk to me about her job that was just essentially fixing all of Atlanta traffic lights and I was like, that sounds like the worst thing ever. I'd never want to be a civil engineer.
Making Audiences Care
00:18:27
Speaker
However, she was so excited about it. I still tell the story this day because it was such a memorable experience.
00:18:34
Speaker
You guys are are doing a a medical project and and there's a bit of ah a culture around Expo, of that the the medical projects always win. And it's difficult to to do a presentation and maybe we'll care about it if it's not a medical project. But i for me, I actually think that it's more impressive if you can make me care about something that I didn't think about caring about before. For example, I was talking with a PhD student in mechanical engineering.
00:19:02
Speaker
And she was getting ready, I think, to do the three minute thesis thing. And her her project was on engineering specifications. And and we were talking about it, and it was like, I can't believe that I care about engineering specifications. like She introduced like what this problem why it was a problem, why she needed to devote five years of study to this thing, and then why how her solution was going to change and impact lives. And I'm like, I never thought that I would have been be here sitting thinking, like yeah, that needs to happen. Absolutely. So I i do think that.
00:19:37
Speaker
The way that you care about a project, and if you actually do care about that project, you can make anyone care about anything. You're just talking about how you've heard people talk about concrete for hours. And I'm sure just like seeing their eyes light up and some of the ways that they they frame these issues, it's infectious. Yeah. Because at the end of the day, they're not really talking about the topic as much as they're just sharing their passion and their love for what
Clear Communication in Design
00:20:03
Speaker
they're doing. and It's kind of like I'm just feeling love for my friend at that moment when they're talking to me and just getting to know what they're experiencing. I guess that just comes off more as we're just growing as like professionals. and
00:20:15
Speaker
Yeah, and I understand why people think the medical, probably I think that is is a fair point, but I think really it's it's it's because you have a little bit of a help, but I do think it's possible for any project of making, and we talked about earlier, the making sure you don't add on undue technical layers that aren't necessary, and and boiling it down to something that you can easily convey why you care about it and why they should care about it outside of just an engineering sphere. I mean, perhaps I could say one one benefit that you guys had at the Expo, because of your experience with your client, your client forced you to move away from typical engineering metrics and into more metrics that are obvious to the eye. and So perhaps that was some benefit.
00:21:09
Speaker
I think it's ah it's a nature of the project itself um being, just being the the way it was with the essentially sheet metal bent tools. There's only you know so much FEA you can do on a sheet metal bent object because it's really not, the entity itself is not that complicated and so I think a big hurdle we wanted to make sure we crossed over was explaining to people and that's why the innovation was what we spent the most time really figuring out how to convey is showing people like yes just because it's sheet metal bent and it's maybe not this whole giant system of electronics like Miguel mentioned earlier doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of intentional design choices and complicated thought that went into it on the back end and it's a benefit to us of being able to convey it to a user but then also then you get the added difficulty of explaining to someone why why it' it's innovative if if it's not as clearly visible as maybe some other projects
00:22:03
Speaker
I also want to add that as Max and I were looking through past years examples of videos made for
Avoiding Technical Jargon
00:22:10
Speaker
Expo. And this is the long form video that we had to produce after we had made our solutions. We noticed that a lot of teams were spending a lot of time talking about their engineering specifications.
00:22:22
Speaker
And they said things like, our design uses 9 volts and can withstand 200 newtons. And Max and I were just kind of laughing to ourselves because nobody really cares about volts or newtons. What we really want to hear about is why the volts or newtons matter in the solution. And so when we made our video, we tried to steer away from talking about specifications. In fact, when we wrote our script, we wanted to write our script to be very easy to understand and have no technical jargon. While on screen, we had figures and data so that if somebody needed to collect that information, they could watch the video. And if somebody didn't want to pay attention to the data and the figures, they could just listen to the video.
00:23:08
Speaker
great Did you have any unexpected challenges or successes that you encountered during the design of your communication or execution? i think In terms of successes, I mean, I think we realized how important physical props were ahead of time a little bit, but I don't think I really realized until having presented a few times to people at Expo, how I probably could have told you nothing. And just giving you the pre the retractors that, you know, the final ones that were used in these cadaver labs, giving you the physical shoulder model, how'd you do that? And then show you the pictures of the resultant of lab. And you probably would have also been like,
00:23:49
Speaker
Man, success, great project. Obviously you need the background a little bit in that, but I think the biggest success that we has a team is not undervaluing that, is making sure that we had intentional, both props and our physical retractors, which was our final solution, available for people to use and then the photos there.
Enhancing Communication with Props
00:24:09
Speaker
I think the some teams that maybe have awesome projects and ideas but maybe don't succeed as well on the communication side might be because it is either more difficult or there's not as much thought put into having that physical solution and thing to show and hold and touch as well as we did make an intentional effort in multiple of our poster like revisions going from the start to the end of it to make it as
00:24:37
Speaker
photo forward as possible was still having the information we needed. And so making sure there's so many other methods of communication other than verbal that we could then adapt to whatever someone might best ingest, if that makes sense. And I think that was probably our biggest success in the communication execution. Right. Because when we're using the rubric, we're not thinking just about the pitch. We're thinking about the booth experience, how I am experiencing your booth as an informational experience where I will We've come to know something about this project. I think something that really helped us shape our communication as the semester went on was the feedback that we received during our interim presentations to our class. Because if we had just made our presentation in a vacuum, there would have been a lot of unaddressed topics that we would not have been prepared to answer.
00:25:28
Speaker
questions that we may not have thought were obvious to us, but maybe you've been obvious to somebody who's never heard of our project before and talking to family members and just people in the medical fields. It's always important to get feedback because that really helped us do a lot of changes to our poster and to the things we talked
Effective Team Communication
00:25:46
Speaker
about.
00:25:46
Speaker
And then we are a large group. We have six members in our team. Part of the whole semester was learning, even though all of us have worked together before, we're all friends. I think just being essentially co-workers means that we have learned how to like rely on each other, but we still had to learn how to balance like six voices, six direction, and six ideas and know when it was a time for there to like be a debate and when was there not that much difference between ideas that it was more important to just pick a direction and run with it um just to make sure that we were making progress as a team.
00:26:25
Speaker
One thing we intentionally did internally, communication-wise, was we realized we had some, nobody's ideas were wrong, they were just different interpretations of the feedback we had received on some of the retractors, and so we made a spreadsheet essentially being like, okay, here's what was said, here's when we talked about it as a team, what our collective agreement on the next steps to improve upon these retractors are, and then go from there because it was wasting a lot of time to have people go and do design, do CAD, do drawings, and then it'd be the rest of the team like, oh, that's not what we expected. And so I think that's probably the biggest takeaway internally from me is understanding that having those expectations, even if you think it's clear, make sure clear to everyone else. And also, you know, not just some one person leading the things, but making sure you're on a collectively clear
00:27:14
Speaker
same wavelength. Same understanding. Yeah, exactly. As a team moving forward, because then if if not, not only does it create frustrations, but also you'll you'll waste someone's time and being full-time students, it's a lot to to juggle at once. And so um taking the extra time, and I think we realized that at the end, is is taking the extra time to make sure that's clear might seem a bit excessive in the moment, but I think it saves time and stress And just, you know, friendly interactions later on.
Tips for Engaging Presentations
00:27:48
Speaker
So other than that, do you have any advice or tips for future engineering students who need to present their projects?
00:27:56
Speaker
Definitely try explaining your project to someone out in the real world, maybe a family member or a friend who has no prior exposure to what you've been doing so far. And if you can get them to understand it, then you probably do well at Expo. yeah focus on why, why it matters. Like, I mean, really the rubric is is pretty great, honestly, in terms of like hitting those three main points. And I also think obviously not everyone has either a project or the platform, if it's not Capstone X though, to do something physical. But I, if you have the opportunity to reinforce something with a physical model, something people could hold, something people can just see rather than you just talking at someone,
00:28:43
Speaker
it It is just invaluable, um not only because it reinforces what you're saying, but also just the different ways people adjust information. Candidates, practice your pitch. um You're going to go off script during the expo, but having an idea of what you want to say and knowing how your ideas flow and tie in together will give you a better presentation. Also, just make your booth cool. People want to hold stuff, people want to see videos, people want to see pictures, stickers. Just make it a place you would want to visit.
00:29:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's important to understand it as an experience. It's not just a pitch, it is an entire experience that can be elevated in a number of different ways, including having 3D printed shoulder that can be popped in and out of place. But yeah, thinking about how you're going to create this information experience for your audience and what do you want them to walk away knowing and feeling.
00:29:45
Speaker
Thank you guys so much for being here. And again, congratulations, not only on your ME category win, but also on your graduation. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thanks. Thanks for listening in to the second part of our two part episode. And thanks for listening to our first season. We'll be back for our second season in the spring.