Sheet A-03 · The Archive
The Archive
Before the pressure boundaries there were shoes, a wheelchair, a blender, a pair of glasses that could read aloud, and a bin that told the truck when it was full.
None of this is what I do now. All of it is why I am able to do it. My father put my ideas on the bench and we found out; these are the years I kept doing that on my own, mostly in Nigeria, mostly for people who could not afford the version that already existed.
The maker years.
Design problems that started with somebody I could see. A mother grinding on a stone. A shoe industry with a complaint it could not name. A friend who could not read a signboard.
Office Console
A retro-modern workspace for a design engineer, with self-adjusting desks and an integrated drawing board.
Ham-Driod Wheelchair
A wheelchair needs to be what it is, not a short-cart. All-terrain, 3-DOF seat, and shaped like a cheetah on purpose.
Dual-P Homer
A blender that runs on mains or on muscle, because an electric one is no help when the power is not on.
eBraille Reading-Aid
Glasses that read text aloud and name what is in front of you, with the analytics running on the device rather than the cloud.
Aba-Shoe Last Redesign
An industry-wide itching complaint traced to the shoe last, then designed out by studying the foot it was actually for.
Eco-Time Piece
A camouflage band built to see how far the early Fusion 360 material library could be pushed. Autodesk featured it twice.
Where the engineering starts.
The earliest of these is a student asking whether a simulation could be trusted enough to change what gets built. I have not stopped asking it.
Smart Waste Management System
Bins for Lagos that compress their own contents and signal when full, so trucks stop patrolling to find out.
Earth-Moving Digger Simulation
Undergraduate research into event-based animation, and how far a motion study could be pushed before it stopped being believable.
FlowMasters Gate-Valve
The first time I asked whether software analysis could stand in for laboratory testing. It took 40 % off the manufacturing cost.
G-10 · Ongoing
CoMakers Africa
A non-profit community makerspace in pre-urban Nigeria. Training, space and equipment for young people developing indigenous products.
I had a workshop as a child and a man in it who would build my bad ideas with me. Almost nobody gets that, and it is close to the whole explanation for why I am an engineer. Founder and community head.
About these sheets
Kept, not polished.
The words on these pages are the ones I wrote at the time. I have tidied the typography and re-graded the renders so they sit alongside the rest of the site, but I have not gone back and improved the thinking.
A revision history you have quietly edited is not a revision history.