A beginner’s guide to making
Menglong Guo is a third-year mechanical engineering student who is on Jacobs Hall’s team of advanced prototypers, serving as a peer resource for fellow students in the makerspace. Last semester, he created a Tips & Tricks workshop to encourage new makers to pursue original designs to completion. In developing the workshop, he drew from his own journey as a designer and maker, hoping to share some of his hard-won insights with workshop participants as they launch their own explorations of the design process. Here is a look at his perspective.
Meng is a maker tempered by failure, steep learning curves, and an unflagging drive toward excellence. While designing can sometimes feel like moving through a dark tunnel, feeling your way to the next iteration, Meng encourages new creators to find meaning in this process, even if the light we see at the end is only the start of the next challenge. Meng’s own design journey has led him to explore wide-ranging projects, from robotics to art. In his workshop and the conversations that followed, he walked us through some of these experiences — starting at the very beginning.
Meng’s earliest exposure to design thinking and engineering came in high school, when he was part of a team of students involved in robotics and bridge-building competitions. Rather than letting the robots loose on each other in miniature destruction derbies, Meng’s team worked to get the robots to complete simple, well-defined tasks. He sees this as the beginning of his drive to solve problems, and the first of the many nights since that he’s spent thinking about how to improve a current design.
It was this kind of restless iterative methodology that carried Meng into mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley. Within his first year on campus, Meng was looking for a hands-on approach beyond the abstraction of the classroom. That’s when he discovered the makerspace at Jacobs Hall. In the makerspace, Meng finally found a space to tinker, and to work on personal projects to stretch his skills as a prototyper.
He quickly got to designing around his new life as a student. Realizing he now had a dorm key and Cal ID to keep safe, one of Meng’s first projects at Jacobs was to attempt to create an easy-access phone case for these items. Reflecting on how he chooses projects, Meng says:
“All of my projects, and making in general, are a very personal process. What I make is meant to be useful just for going about everyday life.”
With this in mind, Meng set about making his case as useful as possible. Looking back at this project in his Tips & Tricks workshop, he shared the process he followed, in the hopes that it would inspire other new makers to iterate fearlessly and relentlessly. Starting out, he knew that his phone case would need to provide a customizable, ergonomic, and accessible way to protect his essential items. An early prototype of the phone case’s design delivered customization, but failed to be accessible for quick use. Evaluating where he could improve the design, he continued to make changes, getting closer to his goals with his second, third, and fourth attempt. With each iteration, he matched his progress against his core design goals, informing his next direction. Reflecting on this progression, he notes:
“Designing is a race against myself, not a competition against other people, so I’m constantly comparing to the maker I was before and looking for improvement.”
What motivates Meng to keep pushing forward on a project? As Meng puts it, “There’s no ‘finally done,’ no celebration, because you’re never quite happy with what you’ve produced. There’s always a next version, and that’s where the motivation to keep going comes from.” Now in his third year at Berkeley, Meng is still making improvements to the phone case.
As Meng spent more time in the makerspace, he conquered new tools in quick succession. As his own creative vision expanded, so did his mastery of the equipment Jacobs Hall offers. Since he first walked into the building as a freshman, Meng has created an incredible variety of prototypes. At his workshop, he demonstrated projects that included a bookend (made as part of the Jacobs Institute’s entry in an Instructables contest), a paintbrush case, a cycloidal gearbox, a variety of 3D printed parts (such as an alarm clock that uses warm and cool lights to signal wake-times), colored 3D printed paintings, a wood and acrylic platform that allows for ergonomic note-taking, an acrylic shell for an electronic mixer, a gripper built with Yale’s OpenHand Project for his robotic hand research, and many others.
If you ask Meng why he creates, he’ll say that creating is hard — really hard. As Meng sees it, doing anything we love is not easy, because projects become a part of us, and we strive for perfection in our work. “To me,” he says, “design doesn’t make me happy, because you wade through so much uncertainty and doubt… but that process is fulfilling to me.”
Ultimately, Meng says, the point of any design journey is to truly learn a skill through to completion, to push through the stress of not knowing how to make something work, and to dive in headfirst anyway. Of course, it doesn’t always turn out as expected. But that’s part of what keeps Meng coming back.
He encourages new users to embrace the challenges (and maybe even the sleepless nights) that often go into the projects we care most about. As we spoke, Meng pushed for a critical lens on design and prototyping, arguing for an approach where the makerspace can become a place for personal growth, constant improvement, and a lot of hard work. His hope is that new makers come to respect the iterative process by really taking the time to learn how to use the equipment, building on this learning over time: as with any prototyping process, a first draft is just the start of a longer process. Though he notes that people follow different pathways through design, it is this one — one marked by relentless iteration at every step — that rings truest to Meng.
Want to try out iterative making yourself? Learn about Jacobs Hall’s resources for making and exploring design. To participate in workshops like Meng’s and get to know the Jacobs Institute’s community of design specialists and advanced prototypers — all of whom bring a unique perspective to design processes — explore offerings here.
Writing & illustrations by Franchesca Spektor | Edited by Laura Mitchell
