About
My name is Derek (Des) Covill and I am a principal lecturer at the University of Brighton in England. I really enjoy working with students on design projects, focusing on design engineering, computer aided design/engineering, general workshop use and 3D printing technologies. I am interested in parametric, algorithm and analysis driven forms and structures for various sport, medical, product and other engineering design applications. I have a range of collaborative partnerships with industry. Some examples include: development of novel control methods for electric motorbikes (OSET) and development of CNC machining and inspection algorithms for medical device manufacturers (ATC).
I am keen on sports, trying to keep as active as possible with running, cycling, cricket and tennis. One of my favourite pastimes is cycling in the woods with my wonderful daughter Ellen shown here.
I like to work on real world problems and I find this helps to inform how I work with students. I try to work closely with technicians and students on practical, challenging projects...hopefully that are fun! I have also designed and made my own custom bicycle and do some bicycle engineering research with various companies (here's a research group I co-founded with my colleague Prof. J-M Drouet)...one day I'd love to be a master frame builder, making wicked, hand crafted frames in interesting ways like the amazing work done by my new colleague Andres.
I'm really excited about doing the fabacademy this year. There are some really great projects on both the fabcentral and the fabacademy sites. I think this year is going to be great because:
- I think it will be fun! I love making things, and this will give me a strong impetus to make a good range of things using new techniques to me.
- I would like to use this to help me develop teaching material and techniques that will help me: support student making/testing projects on both BSc product design, and my bespoke MSc course that I run. My final project may well involve developing a "product design tinkering kit" like the one made for physicists http://archive.fabacademy.org/archives/2017/woma/students/238/ (I thought the projects Denis did here were very good).
- The curriculum is focused on areas that I really want to improve: electronics and producing circuits, programming, NC machining, composites etc. I have some basic knowledge in some of these areas, but I would love the opportunity to learn more, and to actually make some projects in these areas to gain some more practical experience and confidence too.
- My teaching in semester 2 is slightly lighter, so it may be possible for me to commit to the projects.
I am keen to develop as much material from scratch, so early days my website will be quite basic. I have been experimenting with CSS, and will hopefully implement something slightly more stylish in the weeks to come, but for now it will all be very functional, with the main focus being on learning, documenting and developing my technical skills through the projects.
