Product Design Show - ENGINEERING.com

Designers from System Group wanted to build a fully autonomous packaging machine that could build a box for any sort of product. Allison and Vince show how they incorporated bar code data to predetermine the right size box. The result is the very cool “Freebox” machine, as shown in this episode.

Drafting helps cars go faster on the race track, but NASCAR fans were complaining that too much drafting makes races less exciting. So on Jan 10th, NASCAR changed the design rules. That’s good news for fans, but bad news if you are a design engineer for a NASCAR team. The Product Design Show spoke with Drew Kessler, Designer on the PENSKE racing team, to find out how they got ready for race day.

Even professional design teams can learn a few things from the FIRST Robotics competitions. In this episode, Vince and Allison report on a project to design and build a robot that can shoot a ball into a basket. The student team faces a lot of the same challenges as commercial design teams.

Design engineers put a lot of effort into commercial cleaning vehicles, as Vince and Allison discover. All those scrubbing, squeegeeing and drive train components have to fit together somehow.

What's the ultimate tool for demolition? In this episode, Allison and Vince talk to designers who went well beyond the sledge hammer to create a portable tool for tearing down infrastructure.

Architects designed a huge cantilevered canopy for the new Francis A Gregory library in Washington DC. Problem was, hanging a canopy 40 feet from its support isn’t an easy engineering challenge, as the engineers from CST Covers pointed out. Vince and Allison walk us through the solution.

We’ve all heard the distinctive rumble of a performance car. This week we spoke with Pat Hodgins, Chief Engineer of Callaway about how they design that signature sound into their cars.

Prosthetic designers face a fascinating range of issues when designing devices that simulate normal walking. In this episode Vince and Allison review how designers control the proportional loads from walking by capturing and harnessing the ground strike forces.

Indy cars can flip after an initial crash, like Franchitti's famous crash in 2007. Allison and Vince talk to engineers at Dallara about their redesign that makes such famous flips less likely.

Allison and Vince show a range of collaboration tools that help designers collaborate with suppliers on product concepts without sharing the full intellectual property of their designs.