You are an engineer for WhyShopHere Toys. You have been tasked with the following:

Design a child's toy to provide food for fish in an aquarium. The toy should take the form of a Rube Goldberg device, with a minimum of 5 steps to deliver the food into the aquarium.

Problem Definition:

• The device must attach to or interface with "standard" aquariums. A typical aquarium has a 10-gallon capacity. (My son's aquarium, which is slightly smaller than 10 gallons, has the following dimensions: 8" x 16", depth of 10 ½ ". It also has a ½" lip at the top.)
• The overall device (not including the aquarium) should fit in a volume no larger than 2 cubic feet.
• The target consumer is a 5-10 year old child. (Hint: You need to expand this statement into as many customer requirements as you can think of. For example, "brightly colored" could be one of the requirements.)
• Safety must be taken into consideration.

 Refer back to the design process lecture. This project will cover the first 3 steps of the process:

1. Problem definition (this is where the customer requirements are identified)
2. Specification development (this is when the customer requirements are re-stated as engineering specs. Remember, engineering specs must be measurable.)
3. Concept design (represented graphically)

The first 2 steps will be presented through the completion of a QFD chart. The third step will be presented as isometric hand sketches.

Deliverables:

A QFD chart, showing the relationships between the customer requirements and the engineering specifications. (Refer to the Ullman QFD chart posted on MyCourses as an example.)

• 1. You do NOT need to include the bench mark columns.
  2. You also do NOT need the engineering specs for the bench marks, which are the last 2 rows in the Ullman example.
  3. You should think of as many customer requirements (minimum of 10) and engineering specifications (minimum of 7) as you can.
  4. Remember- engineering specifications must be measurable! You must include target values (with units) for all your engineering specs.
  5. You do NOT need to include manufacturing type customer requirements, such as those in the last 6 rows of the example chart.
  6. To determine the relative importance or weighting of the customer requirements, you first determine which of the requirements in the list are absolute musts. (If the musts are not met, the design is useless.) The must requirements are not included in the weighting scheme. They are identified by an asterisk in the Weighting column in the Ullman example. The requirements that remain are considered wants, and weighted according to relative importance. You may use any technique you wish to determine the relative importance; one such method is pairwise comparison.
  7. The cells in the center portion of the chart represent how each engineering specification relates to each customer requirement. The strength of the relationship can vary, with some engineering specs providing strong measures for a customer's requirement and others providing no measure at all. This relationship is conveyed through numerical values as follows:
  1. 9 = strong relation
  2. 3 = medium relation
  3. 1 = weak relation
  4. Blank = no relation at all

• A minimum of 3 different concept designs, described briefly in a Word document, and shown graphically as neat isometric hand sketches, on isometric sketch paper. You may also want to include a multiview orthographic sketch of each design as well, or a second isometric sketch from a different view point. The written descriptions should include an explanation of the operation of the device, and a list of the major components.