Purpose of Design Judging:
Now bear with me on this one - if you don't read through this completely you might take offence at my initial statement. Just to preface this, I will state outright that my “angle” in this competition is primarily from an educational perspective.
The primary purpose of the Design Event judging is to rank and score the teams for the Design Event aspect of the competition. If we try to achieve any more than that over the time allocated then we risk not achieving this core objective. This year was my first as a Design judge, and from what I saw, by the end of 15 minutes there was not much the team could say that would have convinced me to change the score I had in my head. Sure, we could have continued the conversation - anyone who knows me would know that I could keep chatting for hours on the topic of FSAE / vehicle design. But by 15 minutes I had everything I needed to assess whether the team's knowledge was poor, good, exceptional or wherever else it lay on the spectrum.
The "design conflict" we face as designers of the design event, is that of how much time we need to rank and score the team's design effort, (both in terms of the students' knowledge, and its embodiment in the vehicle presented), versus how much time the students want to spend talking about their car. The first objective is a pragmatic one, and needs to be achieved in the minimum time possible, given the judges needed to repeat the process in this case 23 times across the day - and given that the teams also need to get away to get their cars finished / scrutineered that day too. The latter want, to converse with experts - which I'd characterize as "learning about engineering", "conversations about design", or even just plain old "education" - is one of the fundamental principles behind this whole competition. The question is, therefore, how much of this educational value needs to be embedded in the Design Event itself, and how much can we deliver elsewhere.
There is a distinct danger in trying to deliver a Design Event that is all things to all people. I would agree that it is our most prestigious event, and it is a disappointment to me that I was never part of a team that won Design. But just like in vehicle design, if we pile too many hopes / objectives / expectations in the one receptacle, we are going to end up with one Frankenstein’s Monster of a final product. (Note to self – print previous sentence, stick to wall above desk, re-read whenever you are about start writing another forums post … )
So what we tried to do was deliver some more design conversations outside of the actual Design Event. Some ways we addressed this:
- The Saturday night Design Review: - We noted that the previous “design finals” system, amongst other things, gave 4-5 teams access to more time with the design judges. We thought it preferable that all teams have exposure to the Design judges, and thus the Sat Night Review concept was born. Initial plans to do a roving mike arrangement around the shed had to be shelved due to acoustics, so it became a bit of a panel sessions in the centre of the hall. Given the turnout, the generally positive feedback, and given we had to cut short the review due to security curfew, we will look at running a longer, more detailed session next year
- Roving Z :- Admittedly something that was implemented at the last minute, but Mr. Z was wandering the building all weekend chatting to teams and offering his thoughts to them. From what I observed, the conversations and the critiques seemed to be well received. I like the idea of some such conversations happening OUTSIDE of the design event, without the pressures of pointscores being dependant on them. We’ll see what other design experts / professionals we can find next year to do this too.
- I endeavoured to give some judging feedback over the commentary across the weekend - you are welcome to give feedback as to whether that helped or not
- Sunday afternoon guest drivers and interview session:- Thanks to CAMS, we had two top level drivers (Karl Reindler and Anton De Pasquale) drive a couple of cars after Sunday’s Endurance Event, and provide interview feedback on-mike. This was a great opportunity to get a drivers perspective on racecar design, and particularly on the value of good ergonomics.
We hope these initiatives were welcomed, and we are certainly looking for more ways in which we can deliver real design discussions with experts, and improve the educational outcomes of the competition itself. Certainly my favourite of the above is the roving critic, and I’ll do what I can to get more of these critics willing to engage in general design discussions with the teams for next year.
Thanks also for the compliments above, but please understand there were many more people than I who put in a lot more effort and achieved a lot more than I. I’d particularly like to acknowledge Andrew Green, who did a brilliant job to keep things rolling when I had to take time out, and also Rob Chadwick, Adrian Feeney, Scott Wordley and the members of the FSAE-A Consortium
Cheers all
Geoff
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