My name is David Asbury,  a 1T7 engineering science student, with the aim to add as much breadth to my knowledge of engineering as possible such that I may be able to understand and solve some of the more compound, complex problems in the world that involve many branches of engineering. With a rather shallow background in engineering design, I also seek to hone my ability in that area as well. In high school, there were but few chances to actually work on an engineering design project. A few notable examples include building an electromagnet, creating a model car from solidworks and attaching a switch and motor to the car, creating a robot to play soccer with an infrared ball and detectors.

 

Over the course of the first semester of engineering science, I have had the chance to adopt and develop engineering design techniques, philosophies and paradigms. Examples of my exposure to engineering design over the course of the three months would include designing two bridges and building one in a structural engineering course, designing and writing code for numerous python programs, analyzing the design decisions of a group of engineers through the teardown of an artifact, assisting a team of other designers in coming up with a solution to a conceptual solution to a common everyday annoyance, and analyzing in-depth the specific details of a design decision to be made. By framing each of these problems as a work of engineering design, I was able to develop a personal design process and philosophy.

 

Over the course of the second semester, I was able to further refine my engineering design process and abilities. Engineering design experience in this semester includes a semester long project focused on improving the lived experience with one of the communities of the Greater Toronto Area. This project cycled through my entire engineering design process, allowing me to augment my process and improve my execution of said process.

 

Throughout my various design experience, I was able to get a better understanding of what some of my strengths are as an engineering designer. My previous knowledge of CAD software has helped me significantly with the prototyping stage for product-based designs. Additionally, my ability to locate research data quickly allowed me to make good engineering arguments when establishing the requirements. By the end of the second semester, I had also become very efficient at decision making and using various decision making tools to help with this task.

 

To navigate the portfolio, start by checking out my personal design process or design philosophy at the top right corner of the page.