Designer Times
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59. How Designers Design

The generalized conventional view of commercial professions is that one obtains a college education, flashes a fancy degree, then embarks on a career. True for many, but there's lots of folks who did just fine with out the education or the credentials. Walt Disney comes to mind. And there's plenty more, famous and plain, who are wizards at their craft doing it on their own.

My line of work would be considered DESIGN. Sort of a loose description for a job that usually brings something new into the World as compared to a job that performs a valuable repeating procedure without having to risk doing something new and different every day. If you like to CREATE, you run the risk of failures far more often than the folks that are steady workers.

A new fangled product can fail with catastrophic results, bad movies die quick, stupid architects pray for fast growing vines. The mechanical designer attempts to arrange physical materials such that a device will successfully serve mankind. Failure gets the lemon label or worse, resulting in death. But some of us are compelled from an early age to change the World. Not just use and enjoy the existing features, but to bring to life new ones....to DESIGN, and to also accept risk of failure.

The general trade of Mechanical Engineering is where I live. Specifically the Mechanical Design area of what's called Themed Entertainment....like Disneyland Rides or Las Vegas Spectaculars. Cars, Trains, Animated Creatures, Show Action Equipment....anything with a mechanical apparatus. Especially anything new and never been done before.

Some folks specialize in only the appearance design, others are licensed to do engineering, and some concentrate on manufacturing. Still others love the functional testing of mechanical machinery. Many have formal training and a degree to prove it. But I'm the lucky guy....I enjoy doing it all. And I'm not hindered a bit by the lack of a formal degreed education. My practical education was free. Every project was a new lesson. Why pay college tuition when you can get paid while learning.

This kind of learning starts almost as birth. If one is blessed with insatiable curiosity that lasts a lifetime, you just never stop being interested in almost everything. The child who gravitates towards the physical and tangible kind of interests will be the one who always takes toys apart to find out how they work. This child will freely experiment with any combination of physical items. This is also the child who can burn down the house with fire experiments, the one whose new spacecraft shatters your windows. And who totally exasperates every teacher who has the misfortune to have these students in their class.

I cannot remember a time when I was not curious about "how stuff works". I loved to read technical material, build model airplanes, draw cars and such. I rebuilt a Model A Ford in high school. Needing a new body from a junkyard, I was intrigued by how cars get crash bent, how cars are really built. This was the first lesson in structural engineering...fatigue and yield properties of steel. What arrangements of materials resist deformation best and so on.

I love auto racing. This sport even today is a never ending source of design knowledge. If you deign your race car to be strong, it will be too heavy to win. When made too light, it breaks in the slightest crash. Great race car engineers used to be the guys who could win a lot without too many crash failures. Like famous airplane designers, you must make tons of compromises.

Mechanical designs are a tug of war between too heavy, too light, too expensive, and short life. Get it right, and you have a winner.

I started out with training in Auto Styling, which is only concerned with exterior appearance, not engineering. I did industrial design work, strictly styling only. I soon found out I knew little about engineering or manufacturing, but was sure curious. I found I could do an engine swap in my

1952 MG and mechanically design all the new adapting parts for a local fabrication shop to build. A welding shop gave me tips on welding design.

I'd enjoyed wood shop, and metal shop since the sixth grade. So I had a sort of broad primer in how mechanical stuff gets designed and built.

The big Lesson One came when Walt Disney asked me to style the new Disneyland Autopia Car in late 1954. He assumed that since I did body design, I also did mechanical engineering design. I didn't have the smarts to tell him "no". Since everyone else at the Walt Disney Studio seemed to be doing stuff new to them, I figured this is how Disneyland was to built. Thus I embarked on a design knowledge quest that has continued to this day.