Clothespins and Popsickle sticks

Yesterday while blogging, surfing, solving crosswords and yeah working at Starbux, a group of undergrad students (one of whom I had taught a course last semester) stopped by and asked if they could talk to the couple of us sitting at the big table and using our laptops. They were engineering students who had as a part of some design project come up with a product that laptop users could use to hold on to a paper while typing away. A sort of hands free paper holder next to the laptop screen.

They had designed it and then built it out of 2 regular clothespins, 2 popsickle sticks and 3 screws. Seemingly the project did not end there. They were asked to go out and try selling their product. Being entrepreneural that they were, they decided to target the coffee shops since they knew, they would find laptop users there. So they made me their sales pitch... One of them played the Penn State blue card (they had painted the whole contraption blue).

While I had no use of the device, I decided to play along asking them to demonstrate how the product would be used. The salesguy tried to attach it to my laptop but the other pin which was supposed to hold the sheet kept slipping and it did not even have the load of the paper. He sheepishly said that they had tested their product and that it had worked successfully on the prototype.

Being an engineering student myself, i asked them a couple of questions about the design principle, the load they had designed and given a chance how they would improve the design to overcome the obvious flaw that was apparent as they tried to make it work on my computer. Having gotten ideas from them I suggested a couple of my own fixes to the design that were practical and easy to implement. I remembered the time when I had designed my first drill jig at L&T using all the design principles I had learnt in theory at school. When I had shown the design to a tool manufacturer (of 20 years experience), he had simply smiled, appreciated my knowledge and then suggested modifications to the design so that the design would actually be able to be manufactured and used. I had learnt a lot from that experience and had never been told of any modifications to my future designs since then. I doubt if I will ever use the paper holder but I decided to reward this group of students for their thinking and purchased the contraption for $2. I think it was a bold attempt on their part and it was a small price to pay for being able to pay forward the practical knowledge I acquired as an engineer for free.