The End of My First Professional Industrial Design Internship August 25th, 2022
- Erin Marshall
- Aug 26, 2022
- 4 min read
The End of My First Professional Industrial Design Internship
August 25th, 2022
On Friday, August 19th, I finished my first professional Industrial Design Internship with Zebra Technologies. In the last stretch of my time with the company, I completed three projects with different purposes for the company and gave two professional presentations.
One of the projects that I worked on during my time with Zebra was redesigning an RFID receiver mount for the Zebra Motion Works Program. This project deals with the RFID tracking of FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) robots in their regulation fields. This is a part of Zebra's philanthropy as well as a way for Zebra to recruit young STEM students to consider a position in the company. I was in the FIRST program for seven years, ever since 6th grade, and it was amazing to see it follow me into my internship experience. There was a list of criteria that the design had to adhere to, but the main design challenge was making the previously stagnant bracket be able to adjust based on position. I did an initial analysis of the old bracket design to find weak points in the structure and then made multiple different iterations of a new adjustable bracket in 3D modeling. These iterations were critiqued by Zebra employees and their suggestions then influenced the next round of designs.
Another project that I completed while at Zebra was an Innovation Challenge. I was among around 60 interns hired for the summer at Zebra, all of us in different departments and located at different Zebra locations. We were all placed in teams of six and tasked with pitching a business solution based on two different prompts. Our team broke in half to tackle the two prompts. My group of three was looking for a product solution for Zebra expanding market. We chose to expand more into the consumer sector of electronics. Zebra is predominately an enterprise company, with the newly released ZBS printer being their first product in the consumer market. We knew we wanted to expand the product offering for small businesses. We went through a traditional design process of research, user identification, ideation, and validation to create our product pitch. The result had us pitching our small business product expansion to Zebra judges and our fellow interns. I was the design lead of the project and completed in-depth sketches, models, and renders for the projects. I also created mock-up UI/UX designs and was praised for the render quality of the products during the pitch. I had a great time working with people my same age but outside my major, it helped create a well-rounded project.
The last project that I completed during my time at Zebra was my twelve-week product design development inside the industrial design department. I was given a topic by my hiring manager, buy online pick-up in store systems (BOPIS), and told to create a product that would help with some part of that process. Having twelve weeks to work on a project felt like so much time, but also no time at all. In school, we never have that much time for project development so it let me dig deep into each stage of the process. However, the topic of buying online picking up in store (BOPIS) proved to be a complicated and multi-sided experience to improve. I spent almost half of my internship time working with the design research team identifying the people involved in the process, what tools they used, how they used them, and where in the process problems occurred. Building out BOPIS personas, comparing current solutions and ranking them based on effectiveness, and conducting interviews of real BOPIS workers were all part of finding the pain points in the process that could be improved upon. I also created a survey that was taken by one hundred people to gain a customer perspective on the process. Once the main problems were identified, I was able to lead my brainstorming and sketching sessions with the Zebra department and gained amazing concept categories. I then took those concepts, organized them, ranked them, and created my design build-outs on my favorite and most feasible concepts. After talking to my hiring manager I was able to pick the design we both agreed had the strongest legs to stand on.
3D modeling has always been my favorite part of the design process and learning new software and being able to apply that new knowledge made the CADing journey even more exciting. Alias proved to be a big challenge, but one that was invigorating and new. My modeling was slower than it usually is with more familiar software, but having access to a whole room of Alias professionals made asking questions easy and finding new alias tools a common occurrence. I could not be happier with the final model and the renders I created. Pitching my BOPIS solution to the entire Zebra Design department was extremely nerve wreaking but incredibly rewarding when I was given such positive feedback from all the people that helped me develop the concept.
I am so grateful for this opportunity, I feel I have learned so much and had one of the best summers of my life while I was doing it. Everyone I met while completing this internship was so incredibly welcoming and each was a separate vault of knowledge in their field that proved infinitely helpful. I know I will use all the skills I have acquired during my internship for the rest of my design career and that I will cherish all of the memories I have made with the people at Zebra.
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