Creating Project Notebooks

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Authors & Contributors

Dave Alciatore, Mechanical Engineering Professor

A project notebook is a documentation of a design or project's process. It includes many sketches and justifications. Basically, you're justifying the decisions you've made and you're presenting the results of any analyses and testing you've done, as with a prototype you've built. It fully documents a whole design evolution and everything that goes into it.

Lab notebooks record testing done in a lab or testing a product that's already been designed. In the lab, the product is put through different lOops, running it through different temperature variations or putting it on a table that vibrates to see if it falls apart. The data included here includes observations about how something performs.