The 5 why’s

Today’s lecture with Professor Sweet highlighted the idea of the 5 why’s, and as an engineer, I tend to ask myself that whenever I’m working on my Capstone Project. When building a cell research incubator to fit around a microscope, there are 3 main parts that go into it: mechanical box design, environmental controls, and programming. With these different areas of work comes significant overlap, and those 3 parts inherently rely on each other as we move through the design and fabrication process. For example, environmental controls rely on the programming team to code the specific sensors to output accurate temperature and carbon dioxide readings that simulate body temperature. Likewise, the programming team relies on the environmental controls team for accurate calculations so they can program the sensors accurately. And above all of this, both teams rely on the mechanical box design to keep an airtight box so that no heat or carbon dioxide escapes, giving the sensors inaccurate readings. Relating to the 5 why’s, when ordering a heater to heat the box to body temperature, the programming team needs to calculate the wattage needed to power the heater. Going backwards, the programming team needs to know the heat calculations needed for the incubator to idle at body temperature, a responsibility that falls on the environmental team and their thermodynamics knowledge. In addition to that, the environmental controls team needs to know the incubator idle temperature without the heater from the mechanical design team, in order to calculate how much heat to generate for the programming team. So when progress inevitably stalled on the heater purchase, I decided to input the 5 why’s when asking why the heater hasn’t been selected, and following the above path, I was able to find out that the mechanical box team needed to get on their task in order for us to progress.