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Asked by Ben Leigh to Adam, Eloise, Iona, Jarrod, Yip on 16 Jun 2016.
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Jarrod Hart answered on 16 Jun 2016:
I was asked recently to design and build a factory in Korea. I am a bit scared!
I have not done it yet, because it is less scary to be here answering these fun questions!
But seriously, my first plant (i.e. factory) was the most scary, and was in California, we finished it in 2012 and I am very proud of it now (though there was a lot of blood sweat and tears – literally)
But don’t worry, these projects are not really all up to me – I am part of a team, and everything is less scary when you’re in a team!
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Iona Strawson answered on 17 Jun 2016:
One of my roles is working with our manufacturing sites in Brazil and China. One of the things we do is transfer machines designed in London to be built in Brazil for the local market.
The biggest challenge I had was to transfer a brand new machine that was bigger and more different than any machine they had built before. The very first machine they built was from part made in China, sort of like a practice before making the parts themselves. I had to go to China to check all the parts were there (they weren’t), then get them shipped to Brazil. Then once they were in Brazil, fly out there with one of our shop floor guys, to teach the Brazilian engineers how to build the machine and integrate it into their assembly line.
It was tough but we got there! And now its one of their best selling machines.
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Eloise Taysom answered on 20 Jun 2016:
At the moment I think about how to design complex systems of people at technology – like cities, organisations, governments. These types of system are partly designed and partly evolve over time, so no one person or team ‘designs’ them. This makes them really really complicated. I try to work out where in those systems you can change in the future when unexpected stuff happens. For example, imagine what might happen to your school if climate change made the temperature go up a lot. There are lots of ways you could cope with that change: redesign your buildings to be cooler, have new ways of travelling to school, or even move to live somewhere else.
I’ve also done a lot of product design, mainly for smaller products, like a programming language for blind kids. They are technically complicated but the real complexity is in working out what you should design in the first place and whether it meets real human needs.
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Man Hang Yip answered on 22 Jun 2016:
I was sent to a group of factories in south Korea, to advise the production planners how to do better plan in their factories. I do not speak any Korean, and they did not speak any English. We ended up drawing, communicating in body language, and guessing what each other want to say. That was really challenging!
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