Designing Flavors and Scaling Events

After making our scrumptious meal, my groupmates and I then walked over to the actual gardens at the Phipps Conservatory for the next part of the assignment. Tasked with exploring the space through an engineering-focused, problem-solving lens, I got to learn more about different types of trees, fruits, flowers, and other plants I had never even heard of. The experience was both fascinating and thoroughly calming, and helped me to better understand the importance of perspective when it comes to engineering. For the actual assignment, I identified multiple different plants that had functions or shapes that could be copied in a design to help solve a real-world problem and I also helped to come up with a rough product design based off of one of these plants.

Then, for the "Scaling Events" part of the assignment, my teammates and I were tasked with making an excel-based tool that could help a chef scale up the same stir-fry recipe we had used earlier for a party of over one thousand guests. I helped to design this spreadsheet-embedded tool and made sure that the specifics of the recipe were properly conveyed through it. I then also made a Gantt chart for the timeline of preparing the over 1000 servings of stir-fry. This process was very unfamiliar to me, and therefore required a lot of external research, but all of my efforts helped me learn more about what it takes to scale processes, as well as gave me a much greater appreciation of people who work in areas like the logistics of event planning.