Minggu, 15 September 2013

Engineering Drawing, Why Must?

Today, together along with the advance of the industrial engineering’s discipline sciences and the increasing request fothe human resources capable in the industrial affairs, especially in creating the high quality entrepreneurs, therefore we need to learn and understand all the subjects related to industrial engineering. As the students of industrial engineering major, we learn not only the scientific stuffs like engineering, mathematics, but also the social stuffs like management, economics, and communication skills. But, our focus is to learn about industrial process, also known as the process of changing raw materials into value-added things and everything related with it, and entrepreneurship.In industrial engineering, there is a subject called engineering drawing (or technical drawing). However, some of our students often ask why they learning drawing something while they should had focused in entrepreneurial stuffs.Maybe that is a sceptic question. As we know, when entrepreneurs want to make their products, they need to draw. A product before it is created, it must be designed at very first time. Because the design contains important things like the format, shape, and size of the product, sum of materials needed, how it will be created, even the goodness and badness of the product itself.If we do not have any design, our products are possible to go out from our wish.To design them, we need to know engineering drawing. Engineering drawing comes out as one of efficient communication media among engineers and it can be recorded for design process. A technical drawing is much more effective than a written plan [1].In other words, drawings are “engineering language” or “the language for engineers” [2]. Technical drawings allow engineers to create designs, make some calculation from it, and work with manufacturers. The competency to understand and work with technical drawings is a necessary skill on the way to become an expert in this scope [3]. However, the main point in studying engineering drawing is how we can imagine the real things and its real aspects in the picture, and then converting our imagination into drawings.
In learning engineering drawing, we will obtain abilities and learn four main essences. They are the ability to gather information (information gathering), the ability to generate ideas (idea generation), the ability to enhance concepts(concept enhancement), and design visualization [4]. The first essence is information gathering. It includes looking for, collecting, and understanding the product’s picture data [4]. This can be done by creative thinking process, looking for informations about the product everywhere possible (such as from TV, mass media, internet, etcetera) or even comparing the own product with the competitors’. This is the first step of engineering drawing and could not be simply and easily skipped since the factory would not be able to create the best concept and design for their products if they do not have sufficient information about the product they are going to make.Collected informations are recognized, analyzed, reliably proven and understood afterwards, so that we can use only the useful ones to create the design of our product. In the industrial engineering, information gathering process can bring more benefits, such as when the industrial engineers look for the information in analyzing factory process, and causes of problems that happen in their factory.
The second essence is idea generation. It includes mining and expressing product design ideas [4]. After obtaining information gathered from the gathering process, created ideas should be converted into a sketch as a concept, and a good understanding of projection is needed here to represent what we want to do with this concept later. This concept has an important role to the next step. If we can not create our idea into the first sketch, we will never gain the real design of the things or product which will be produced. And all we have done in the first step will be useless. The industrial engineers must be able to drive their idea into the realness. In the entrepreneurship, the industrial engineers always face several options of decisions, and they have to decide which are the best for their success later. The first concept can not be only one; we should make more. So, when one of the concepts fails, we can choose another among the concepts we have crated. However, choosing the best concept is not easy. We should be able to think forward and analyze the benefits and the disadvantages of each one. So, the possibility to error can be decreased and depressed as soon as possible.
After getting a concept, what we have to do is to enhance it into a final and perfect one through the step called concept enhancement. Concept enhancement includes enhancing product design concepts appropriately with international standard of engineering drawing [4]. Before we develop the concept, we need to understand the details about the product’s size, shape, units, and the tolerance limits permitted for the mistakes.It is intolerable if the industrial engineers produce the same products with the different shape and size. Maybe some are tolerable, but only at the slight differences. It is called the tolerance limit.This process influences the popularity and the function of the products in the society, especially in the today’s industrialization era.
And the final essence, the last step required to do in engineering drawing is design visualization. It includes creating product design into a more complete and communicative picturing [4]. Things required here is making the enhanced concept into the real product. We have to master the rule of product’s configuration, simplifying and/or fixing the picture, the link of the picture, and the using of the Computer Aided Design. The design of the product will be useless if the concept is not transformed into the real and useful thing. This is one important point that the industrial engineers must have, they have to think rationally and they must have a habit to accustom themselves to make their ideas come true and never let their ideas only exist in their mind.

That is all the benefits and the function of the engineering drawing in the industrial engineering. We can conclude that the design of the products is the first step of product manufacturing process. The arranging of the product’s design by the designer can be reached through some steps in the long designing process. Those all will we learn in engineering drawing. Therefore, engineering drawing is needed and important in industrial engineering, especially for our industrial engineers who want to be the high-quality entrepreneurs.


References :
[2] Sato, Takeshi G., and N.Sugiharso H., Menggambar Mesin Menurut Standar ISO, Pradnya Paramitha, 1996.

[4] Anggrahini, Dewanti. 2013. Introduction to Engineering Drawing, formal class lecturing on September 13th, 2013

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