A Beginner's Guide to Little Engineering

Hey everyone. Welcome to my blog. 

I’m taking a class called “The Branding of Me” this semester in the Hussman School of Media and Journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill, taught by the amazing Gary Kayye. For some reason, Gary is requiring us all to write blog posts twice weekly, so here I am. This is my homework, believe it or not. 

He told us to write about our passions, and when I think about it, my greatest passion is engineering. Not in the way you think, though. Like, not the building-bridges kind or launching-a-rocketship kind (which is super cool, too!). What I am really passionate about - what gets me worked up more than any other subject - is the Little Engineering of the world. The design and user experience side of engineering. 

Let me give you an example. In my kitchen, my dishwasher and pots and pans drawer are placed at a ninety-degree angle, so that when the dishwasher is open, I cannot open the pots and pans drawer, and vice versa. When I am unloading pots and pans from the dishwasher, I have to take them all out first, then close the dishwasher, then open the drawer, and place them inside. It’s a real hassle. You might be thinking, “Marigrace, don’t be dramatic,” or, “Marigrace, this is a first-world problem,” or, “Marigrace, lots of people experience little things like this every day and don’t make a fuss about it.” 

I get so angry about little design flaws like this, however, because someone, at some point in time, had to have made the decision to inconvenience my life like this. Some interior designer or contractor working for the Carolina Square apartment complex decided to not only muddle up the feng shui of my own kitchen but gave all the other three-bedroom models at Carolina Square the same backache. And I just can never understand how a professional designer, someone meant to engineer the space to be comfortable and enjoyable, could have made such an ergonomically egregious error. 

Take, as another example, those little plastic tabs that you have to pull off of orange juice cartons and milk jugs before opening them (see the below image). Yes, they’re great for preventing sneaky grocery shoppers from tampering with the contents, but they’re a pain in my butt. Either my nails are too short to grab onto the little tab or I manage to pull a little bit of the plastic before breaking it and dashing my hopes of getting the cap off at all. Each time I find myself standing in my kitchen, rendering a carton cap useless, I say to myself, “There has to be a better way.” And I’m not the only one who thinks so.

Courtesy of Reddit.

So that’s what I’m going to write about. Twice a week, every week, for the next three and a half months. Little Engineering. The stuff that just gets me saying, “There has to be a better way.” Sometimes I’ll try to explore solutions to these problems. I’ll actually try to find “the better way.” Other times, I’m just going to complain. I might even point out to you one of those things that never bothered you before but now that I’ve mentioned it, it’s going to bug you for the rest of your living days. (Honestly, that’s kind of the goal. I need people to suffer with me. It’s a curse to constantly be noticing these little flaws.) 

I hope you’ll join me in my exploration of Little Engineering. There’s going to be a lot of negativity heading your way this semester, but, like, the right kind of negativity. The kind that, for me, at least, makes you think critically. The kind that makes you ideate. The kind that makes you create. The kind that really gets you to learn and improve and augment your understanding of humans and their dynamic nature. 

But that’s enough for today. See you Thursday.