Design Team LC Reference

The Terrapin Works Design Team’s purpose is to provide the University of Maryland community and adjacent organizations and small businesses with an accessible professional design service, while providing University of Maryland students with experience working on real design projects for clients.

The Design Team is composed of one full time Design Program Manager, a student Design Team Coordinator, student Trainees, Designers, and Senior Designers.

• It is the duty of Design Trainees to work on projects mentored by a Senior Designer to develop their skills, fulfilling assigned tasks.
• It is the duty of Designers to fulfill their assigned tasks and produce required deliverables for their projects in a quality and timely manner.
• It is the duty of Senior Designers to lead design on projects, coordinate with clients, perform procurement for projects, set tasks for other designers, and perform design reviews.
• It is the duty of the the Design Team Coordinator to oversee ongoing design projects from a workflow level, help balance staffing, onboard new design team members.

The Design Team Coordinator is expected to work at least 10 hours a week specifically on Design Team tasks and management. In that time they should oversee ongoing design projects by facilitating any necessary tasks and removing blockers for design team members, especially those managing projects.

The Design Team Coordinator’s full-time superior and partner in managing the Design Team is the Design Program Manager (currently Lauren Rathmann). The Design Program Manager should be in all Design Team management meetings, is responsible for approving the commencement of new design projects, should be involved in design reviews for client deliverables, should be involved in the post-mortem processes for all completed design projects, and guides the long-term trajectory of the Design Team, representing the team at full-time management meetings.

The Design Team carries out projects that are primarily Computer Aided Design (CAD) and prototyping. In addition, we also work on small run production and helping get in touch with larger scale manufacturers.

In terms of manufacturing methods, we have previously designed parts to be made with milling, sheet metal die cutting and bending, various methods of 3D-printing, laser cutting, etc.

Design Team projects follow this general structure:

1. Feasibility Analysis - Determine the problem statement, assess whether the project can be reasonably accomplished with the resources available to the Design Team and Terrapin Works. This is primarily the responsibility of the Design Program Manager.
2. Estimate - Determine what the specific stages and deliverables are for a project, lay out the expected timeline and provide a quote to the customer. At this point a Senior Designer should be in the loop and handling these tasks as the project’s manager.
3. Active Work - Proceed to complete deliverables, with payment and delivery according to the terms agreed to during feasibility. For this stage, the project’s managing Senior Designer will need to loop in one or more designers, assigning them tasks and performing design reviews. Identifying these designers and getting them on the project is a responsibility of the Design Team Coordinator.
4. Maintenance - Once the primary deliverables have been handed over, if there is any long term support component to the project, resources should be kept available to do so. However, any maintenance activities must be agreed to and paid for.
5. Close-Out - Once a project is complete, it should be reviewed for any notable failures, possibilities for improvement, etc.

Additional information on these steps and how they integrate with Jira states can be found here.

The Design Team frequently works with the other labs at Terrapin Works, placing orders for manufacturing via Papercut (maker.umd.edu). Designers who are cross-trained in specialist labs like the AFL, IFL, and RPL are great resources, and it is critical for the Design Team Coordinator to be aware of who to ask for advice on design for manufacturing and TW capabilities.

Materials for design projects should be procured through Procurify, following the guides linked here. If you face any issues with procurement, get in touch with Madhu. Any purchases made for a project should be included in the final invoice.

Parts for design projects should be requested through Papercut, using the Design Team Tracking shared KFS account. The Design Team Coordinator and all active Senior Designers should be granted access to this account by a full time employee.

Parts can also be prototyped directly by designers on machines they are trained on or with manual tools.

The equivalent cost of papercut jobs should be included in the final invoice. If prototyping is done by designers, it should be included as additional billable hours.

The design team, unlike most labs, bills for a service rather than a product. Any given invoice is also often very different from any other due to the diversity of projects. The specific guide which should be referenced when billing design clients can be found here.

Additionally, not all clients will be billed at the same time in a project’s progress, depending on their specific terms. The three general options the design team should offer clients can be reviewed here.

There have been many cases in the past of projects having insufficiently detailed or insufficiently explicit terms of payment outlined upfront. Due to a perceived standard of courtesy, designers have often delivered designs or prototypes prior to payment, with the client absconding and never paying for the work done. For this reason, it is critical to ensure the terms of payment are explicitly outlined with the statement of work, and to adhere to them.

New Designers should be directed towards this wiki page to get an overview of the tools that are used by the Design Team. After they have read through this, they should be onboarded onto the following systems:

1. Design Team Ticket Queues - Access for these can be requested from the Terrapin Works Portal.
2. Jira - A full time employee should be able to provide access to this. Design team specific Jira usage processes are linked in this folder.
3. Google Drive - A full time employee should be able to provide access to this. PROCESS MAY CHANGE
4. GrabCAD - The Design Team Coordinator should have the credentials for the GrabCAD workbench account and add members as necessary.

In order to stay apprised of the status of projects and to ensure the design team keeps improving, the Design Team Coordinator should schedule recurring meetings.

In the past, this has been done with a 30-minute weekly meeting to review progress and any blockers on existing project with all project managers, the Design Team Coordinator, and Design Program Manager, as well as a 60-minute bi-weekly meeting to review design team policy and long-term improvements with the Design Team Coordinator and Design Program Manager.

The Design Team does not make use of the autoscheduling feature of Paycor. Instead, Design Scheduling is done in two phase:

1. Prior to auto-scheduling, it is the Design Team Coordinator’s responsibility to schedule all necessary recurring meetings involving members of the Design Team. These meetings should then be added to Paycor as pre-existing shifts for all the relevant personnel and should be recorded as pre-assigned hours in the scheduling spreadsheet.
2. After the auto-scheduled space generate their shifts, the Design Team Coordinator needs to manually assign Design Team members their hours.

The Design Team primarily interacts with clients using the Ticketing System, found at help.eng.umd.edu. Tickets relevant to the Design Team should be placed in the Design Team Queue, and promptly responded to. Tickets should be linked to from the Design Team Project Tracker.

The Design Shop (previously known as the Rapid Prototyping Center or RPC) is the physical home of the Design Team, where team meetings, design work, prototyping, and testing should all take place. It is located in TAP 1102, and contains CAD ready workstations, hand and power tools, collaborative work areas with ancillary monitors, basic soldering and electronics equipment, and project and material storage cabinets. The space is also inhabited by the Terrapin Works Software Team. It is the Design Team Coordinator’s responsibility to keep the space in good working order to facilitate effective design work and provide a welcoming place for customers to come to interact with the Design Team.