The process of naming and labeling ideas and objects is another missing basic of utmost importance. The process of engineering is all about clarity, about communication, and about conveying ideas effectively. Labeling different parts of a whole allow us to more clearly communicate about that part, resulting in more cohesive teamwork overall for everyone involved. And as engineers, we are often forced to work with terms whose names we have never heard before.
In my General Engineering 101 class, we use a program called Inventor to construct different parts. Inventor itself is a name, or a specialized label for an object. Inventor is also full of a number of different labels for things that you didn’t even know had a label to describe. A good example is a chamfer, or what can be described by Wikipedia as “a beveled edge connecting two surfaces.” In short, it is as if you chopped off a corner at an angle. A similar feature is known as a fillet (pronounced fill-it, not like a fish fillet). A fillet is basically rounding off an edge in order to make it look nicer, reduce stress, etc. Another common feature is known as an extrusion. When you need to make a two-dimensional sketch into a three-dimensional shape, you extrude the 2D sketch by essentially pulling it up and adding another dimension. For example, if you extruded a circle, you would be left with a cylinder. Now, the makers of Inventor did not come up with the word chamfer, fillet, or extrude, but at the same time, these aren’t exactly commonplace words you would expect to hear in everyday conversation. Inventor uses these words in order to label different processes with one-word terms. That way, if you know you need to round off an edge, you know you need to hit the fillet button. Plus, fillet fits on an icon a lot better than “round off edges.”
In class and in the PowerPoint, we learned that labels help make processes easier. Indeed, that is exactly the case with Inventor functions; one-word terms are much easier than trying to describe what needs to be done with words. Moreover, these words are memorable enough that they stick in your mind when you’re trying to model your part. Overall, as we learned in the PowerPoint, labels are an important step for further inquiry, and it is important to learn labels as well as learn to label effectively.
