Month: February 2019

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Week 5 Reflection

This week is the phase where we collected our research and turn them into ideations. As a group we collaborated together and answered a few questions of how to transition from research into ideation. First we wrote down the words related to the questions and then tried to categorize them into groups. I feel like this step is very important, because this way we can always come back whenever we are stuck during ideation, we look back what we prioritize the most. Also, this step has given us a great head start on what we are looking in our “knee pad”. It’s like a check box that we can tick off along the way of our ideation.

We had to watch the video about Professor Weightman talk about how what is a good design. First, he talked about the three key points. He said, a good design consists desirability, viability and feasibility. He said, the environment, business and responsibility of the product should co-exist for a product to be in the market. In order to succeed, first we need to identify what the people want. So, we ask people what they do and what they need. Then after collecting data, designers will creating empathic models based on their research. This model is where designers will conduct experiments where they try to understand the user’s emotions and feeling using a product in a certain environment. And then with all the data collection, the designers will dilute them and decide which are the most useful one. As a person who learns best from experience, I like how we, as the designers, are conducting experiments based on our users. This way, we can critically pin point down how our knee pad should be designed as.

Study sketches of Jenna’s prosthetic leg and knee pad design.

This week, we had the honor to meet author, John Hornick as a guest speaker. He told us about 3d printing for health innovation and products for people with special needs. He featured various 3d printed products that seem to be impossible about a decade ago. And now, these children in Miami are getting heart treatment by the doctors studying a 3d printed model of the child’s heart. This may sound unethical to some people. But John told us that we are improving the products as we move one. His speech inspired me to persuade along with my research. I feel like I have been limiting myself when I was ideating ideas. I felt like the technology wasn’t there to support my ideas. However, like John told us, I need to go outside my comfort zone. I will need to put my foot in our mentor, Jenna’s shoe, by scanning her knee. In the future, I will try to scan her knee and create a quick mock up of a knee pad and try all on them. As our group, we will try falling on different terrains to find which parts of the knee needs the most cushion to minimize the impact. And we will test them using various of materials as well.

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Week 5 Reflection

During the class on Wednesday, we were grateful that we can have our guest speaker to provide us more inspiration and advice related to the 3D-printing. I learned about that 3D-printing can actually benefit lots of fields, such as health products, service dogs, daily-life products, and physical ability. It’s really inspiring that people are utilizing this technique to make other people’s life different.

With the guide from our TA, we posted some of the features related to people that we interviewed last week. Each team shared what they’ve done so far, and I was inspired by some of my peers’ great ideas.

After we finished posting our insights, we found three big categories ” life & career”, “future aspiration”, and “major difficulties” based on the response from our interviewees.

This weekend, we conduct an interview with our mentor Ryan and two of his friends Avery and Zain. They shared their life experience, some difficulties that they’re facing, and expectations of our product. Based on their response, I would say different people have different level of disabilities, and it’s really hard to find a way to benefit all of them. Our project is to help them multitask in their daily life. However, based on the advice from Ryan, Zain, and Avery, I think we might need to consider making our goals more specific and realistic, since there are lots of different ways to define “multitask”. It might be more feasible for us to pursue in one goal – making something that can make certain group of people’s life more convenient, even though a small product focusing on one specific area would work.

I would say we need to talk more about the goals of our project this week and try to finalize a clear and feasible direction. We might need to talk more about it with the professor and our TAs. We should consider about their thoughts and advice towards our project. After interviewing 4 people, I found it’s really important for us to help them, and I really want to. I just want to make sure that we can actually make something that’s useful for certain people by the end of this semester.

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Design Thinking = Human-Centered Design

What is Design Thinking?

‘Design thinking? Is there a specific method of thinking for designing? Is it about not liming yourself so that you can think of something creative? What exactly is design thinking?‘

These were some questions on my mind when I heard the term “design thinking” for the first time. As someone who does not believe in my own creativity, I thought the term must be about a specific process that the designers follow when designing something new that helps them foster creativity. I thought this must be the secret formula for being creative and coming up with innovative ideas.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t quite what design thinking was. However, it is a critical mindset to have for successful designing. In fact, this may not be THE secret formula for fostering creativity, but it is certainly a mindset that will help with the process. Design thinking is basically another term for human-centered design, which means that when designing a product, every decision made has to be based around the intended user of the product. This is a critical mindset to have because when you design for the intended users, it may lead to an idea that you would not have thought of otherwise. While you might be working on a design believing that you are providing what the users want, if you do not take an effort to reach out to those users and understand their motivations and desires, you may be going in a completely wrong direction.

An example of such situations was shared by our TA, Mehment Aydin. He shared a story of how for children, going through a MRI machine is a scary experience. It is challenging for them to stay calm without any movement while being stuck in a dark, narrow space with lots of noise surrounding them. Upon hearing this problem, we might jump straight into how we can adjust the machine to provide more comfortable experience. Perhaps we can find a way to decrease the noise level. Perhaps we can make the bed more comfortable. But what solved the problem was much simpler than those ideas.

Our TA, Mehmet Aydin, sharing examples of successful designs of providing MRI experience by going through design thinking

What was the solution? Turn the whole MRI experience into a fun role-playing game. Instead of having the children go through the MRI process in all seriousness, the solution was to have the doctors and nurses be pirates and have the children to stay hidden from them in the MRI machine, which is decorated as a ship, until the whole procedure was finished. Now, instead of being afraid of the darkness and the noise, the children were having fun and filled with excitement as they stayed in the machine, “hiding” from the bad guys. In fact, Mehmet shared that they had so much fun that they were asking when would be the next time that they come back.

How could someone reach such a solution without truly understanding the problem from the perspectives of the users? That is what a design thinking is all about.

Jeff Ginger sharing the importance of design thinking and how the intended users need to be on your mind constantly when designing

Going Forward

This mindset of design thinking is very important for my team as we try to design something that will allow the youth wheelchair users to easily customize their wheelchairs and improve their experiences. We really need to understand why the users may want to customize their wheelchairs and in which way they would like to. To find out all these different factors, we are in the process of reaching out to not only youth wheelchair users but also adult wheelchair users who have experiences of being youth wheelchair users themselves. We want to help them step into their childhood and have them share their “dream wheelchairs.” What is this wheelchair capable of? What does it look like? We want to bring out the child-side of the users to really dive into the limitless creativity we had when we were kids. By being in this mindset of children, we believe that we will be able to find a solution to help the youth wheelchair users enjoy their experience more.

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Week 5

This week we had multiple guests. The first one was a member of the Illini Service Dogs organization on campus. She came in to talk about some suggestions that could manifest into potential projects.

We also had John Hornick join us. He talked about how 3D printing is being used in new and innovative ways that we may not necessarily think about. He showed us various research projects that are being conducted all over the world, mainly focusing on how 3D printing has been used in the healthcare industry. Such examples include utilizing 3D printing to print scans of hearts and skulls so surgeons can study the models and prepare the best plan for going about the procedure. The unconventional and innovative ways in which 3D printing is being utilized is what stuck out to me the most during his presentation. I believe a lot of people put limitations on products and ideas. However, nothing has a limitation. People everyday alter/customize products to fit their needs without even realizing it. The fact that some researchers and doctors are trying to 3D print body parts etc. attest to that. Although 3D printers were originally made for printing plastic models, people all over decide every day to use 3D printing to fix a need that they are facing. I believe that this is an important lesson to keep in mind when going through the design process. Sometimes it isn’t all about creating something new that no one has ever seen before, it is instead about implementing improvements in devices that already exists to better suit our needs.

Champaign-Urbana community fab lab

We also had Jeff Ginger from the Champaign-Urbana Community Fabrication Laboratory on our campus. He kinda took us through a virtual visit of the fab lab by explaining what and who it is comprised of. One of the main focuses of his presentation was thinking about 3D printing and digital making from a community approach. There are a lot of fabrication laboratories and maker spaces around the world because there are a lot of problems around the world and everyone needs access to resources, such as maker spaces, to deal with such problems.

After that, we gathered into our teams to share information on the research that was completed up until now. From there we wrote on post-it notes one thing we believed was significant about what others shared. Slightly after we collected all of the post-it notes and we categorized them into groups. Since our initial mentor has yet to get back to us we did not have a lot of feedback to share with each other. However, we decided going forward that we will reach out to other expect users and mentors who could assist us with our research. Although we still don’t have an exact idea of what we want to work on, we are hoping that through talking with the mentors we will be able to narrow down our options and decide on a fun and informative project.

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Week 5: 3D Printing Makes Things Possible

The class in this past week was filled with presentations and activities. There were four presentations in class in this past week, including (1) a presentation from the Illini Service Dogs about the needs of the organization, (2) a presentation from John Hornick, the author of 3D Printing Will Rock the World, focusing on the changes that 3D printing, 3D scanning, and bioprinting brought to the medical industry, (3) a presentation from Jeff Ginger of the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab about the network and the tools we can get from the fab lab, and (4) a presentation and leaded activity on the process of design thinking/human-centered design from the TA Mehmet Aydin. Out of these four presentations, two of them were extremely memorable to me: the presentation from John Hornick and the presentation from Jeff Ginger.

3D Printing’s Impact on Medical Industry

3D Printed prosthetic hand, soft touch, more realistic looking hand.

Prior to John Hornick’s presentation, I knew that 3D printing technology is becoming more famous as it allows the way of production changes. I have not noticed that it brings so many changes to the health and medical industry, especially in helping people in need. I found many examples he mentioned memorable to me. The first was the 3D printing for prosthetics because it was something that we previously mentioned.

3D Printed skin for facial reconstruction & 3D printed frontal forehead

The second part that was memorable to me was the customization feature of 3D printing. The facial reconstruction that allows people who severely injured to regain the ability to return to a normal life is very inspiring and hopeful in my perspective. The stories make me think about our power in making changes and helping people who are in need. It may be hard for us to design products that can change the medical industry at this point, but we can definitely use this powerful technology to try to improve the quality of life of people in general.

Introduction to Fab Lab

Jeff Ginger’s presentation mainly focuses on the introduction to the fab lab. In this introduction, we learned that the fab lab has a lot of great tools for “innovators”. More importantly, the fab lab is opened to the public. This means that anyone in the community will have access to the amazing tools that he or she can use for designing a product and producing a product at a low cost. This encourages rapid prototyping and production as well as lowering the cost of production. This reminds me of my experience in the IMPACT Labs, a maker-space partnering with WeWork, in the WeWork building. It provides high-end technologies and expertise that can allow entrepreneurs and companies to bring their concept into a production-ready product. There are a lot of high-end technologies in this maker-space, which is very similar to what technologies the fab lab can offer. I was amazed by the high-end technologies I saw when I was in the IMPACT Labs in Israel back then. Now, I think that it is really amazing to know that we have such high-end technologies available in our community too.

IMPACT Labs Logo Under the WeWork Building
The companies that cooperate with the IMPACT Lab and use the IMPACT labs
  • 3D Printers in the IMPACT Labs
  • 3D Printed House Model
Laser Cutting Machine in the IMPACT Labs
3D Scanning of boat prototype in IMPACT Labs
3D Scanning of a Boat Prototype in the Impact Labs in Israel

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Week 5 Reflection

Group In-class Activity

Unfortunately this week I was unable to attend the entirety of class due to a scheduled interview. Although I missed our guest speaker I was pleased to make it back for our group activity.

When I arrived groups were beginning to split off to complete an activity that better helped us organize our thoughts to find the true purpose of our project. As my team caught me up to speed, we tried to put together our board of both functional and emotional ties to our company. We decided to break down our thoughts into four sections: Customization, Feeling, Function, and Protection. (See below in our picture what characteristics we placed in our sections). I really found this activity established the collaborations between all of us.

Class Activity

Next Week Outlook

Moving forward to my group and I are going to try to establish more off of our group activity. We are trying to schedule an interview with another user to gain another outside perspective on our project. Jenna has been trying to connect us with her friend that can help us get another perspective. Also, we need to schedule a time to get a 3D scan of Jenna’s leg so we can start working on sizing for our product. Finally, we’re beginning to work on our 3D printing skills and learning Fusion360 so we can hit the ground running Wednesday. I’m excited to get to work.

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Week 5

This week we were introduced to four guest speakers: Sneha Subramanian from the Illini service dogs, John Hornick author of “ 3D Printing Will Rock the World”, Jeff Ginger from the CU Community Fab lab, and the Illinois Informatics Institute. We began with a brainstorming session with the Illini Service Dogs. We specially were looking at areas of opportunity with improving disabled users independence with service dogs. Ideas bounced around and some really interesting things came from this. After the brainstorming session John Hornick brought so much of the 3D printing industry to our attention. There are so many trends out there, but John emphasised 3 main trends. One of which is that 3D printing spurs innovation, it also increases democratization. Lastly 3D printing is full customizable. I personally really enjoyed all the different innovative projects globally that John mentioned to us.

Jeff from CU community Fab lab gave a very energetic and passionate overview of the lab itself. He told us of all the resources and network we have here on campus. He then went into showing some of his personal projects, all produced at the CU Fablab. He designed this really cool solar power laptop case that charged his laptop. He also created this octopus dongle sort of thing that has every plug in port you could think of. Jeff seems to really be passionate about innovation and I though his overall presentation was inspirational.

After the guest presentation we were given on from our TA Mehmet Aydin on Design Thinking. During his presentation he introduced us to the Design Thinking Modules. You have Inspiration- Ideation- Implementation model. You then have Empathy- Define ( we focus on defining the opportunity from an empathetic standpoint. Then you have Prototype- Test phase. Mehmet also mentioned the idea of diverging, converging and repeating the entire process. You have to just do it. It kind of ties back to last weak guest Mike Henson statement of, “ Fail early, fail often.” The design process is a process of decision making and doing things. You have to ideated on an idea and act on it. Fail and fail and through each failure new innovation ill emerge.

Once Mehmet’s presentation  we broke off into our teams to do a “Stories & Experience” exercise. The task of the exercise was for us to look at our interview Q/A and diverge deeper insight from them.We were able to really figure out our users frustrations, emotions, limitations, pretty much the good and bad. Solicestice in particular, was able implement the experiences of the user to create more value with our potential product. It gave us a framework to further structure of customer discovery and validation of the idea itself.



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Democratization of Innovation

Expanding Innovation

This week we had four presentations that focused on how 3D printing is revolutionizing the world, information on the different maker resources around campus, and an in-depth guide into the Human-Centered Design process. Our first presenter was Sneha from Illini Service Dogs. Her presentation focused on opportunities for our class to help make tailored solutions to Illini service dogs. While our group is currently focused on making a protective cover for Jenna’s leg, if for some reason this plan falls through, Illini Service Dogs would be a great partner to pivot too.

  • John Hornick presents to the class
  • Sneha shares opportunities to work with Illini Service Dogs

Our next speaker was John Hornick, author of the book 3D Printing Will Rock the World, and a global speaker on 3D printing. John’s talk focused on how innovation, democratization, and customization of 3D printing is revolutionizing many different industries. A key pillar of his talk focused on the spread of 3D printing to the masses. He told a story about a 5-year-old named Cameron Haight who has 3D printed attachments for his prosthetic hand and also has 3D printed prosthetics for other kids suffering from similar conditions. With the spread of 3D printing to more people, it allows for people’s ideas to flourish and for innovation to occur. A perfect example of this is our class and the maker lab at the Gies College of Business. By giving students a space to explore 3D printing technologies and teaching them human-centered design methods, our class is fostering innovation.

Exploring Campus Resources

Our next speaker was Jeff Ginger, who runs the Fab Lab at the University of Illinois. I had been to the Fab Lab once before for a school project, but I had no idea how many resources the Fab Lab has to offer. Jeff talked a lot about how the Fab Lab and the Makerlab were working with other maker spaces on campus to try and open up resources to all students and not just those in certain programs or majors. I thought this was a very noble idea and tied in well to the democratization of resources and innovation that John talked about. I also had no idea how prevalent Fab Labs were worldwide. The UIUC Fab Lab is part of a network of hundreds of Fab Labs worldwide that work to share best practices and to give maker resources to as many people as others. I especially resonated with the Fab Lab motto “Don’t DIY, Do it with others” because I thought that it perfectly embodied the collaborative nature of making.

Trying It Out

We spent the rest of class working with our teams to better identify the need we were working to solve. We used information from our interviews to fully understand all facets of the need before we dove into the solution. Initially we wrote out everything we could think of on post it notes and put them on the wall. The next step was to group the thoughts so that we could identify the mian characteristics of the need. Our group’s categories were feelings, customization, function, and protection (shown below). I had done an exercise similar to this in a previous class and I found it a very good way to encourage collaboration and creativity when discussing a problem in groups.

This week we are continuing to finish up our need group interviews and I am looking forward to begin designing in Fusion 360 in class on Wednesday!

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Understanding & Ideating & Researching

This week’s class was jam-packed with new information, new perspectives, and new brainstorming techniques! To start, we had a speaker who has a lot of expertise when it comes to the applications and vast expansion opportunities for 3D Printing. In particular, he discussed the possibilities of 3D Printing in the healthcare industry. For example, surgeons are able to create 3D models of their patients’ organs to best understand how to go about the surgery with less unknowns. Being able to interact with the patients’ internal issues in a 3-dimensional space is groundbreaking and can be incredibly helpful in applications such as tumor removal.

Guest speaker videochatting the class discussing medical innovations involving 3D Printing.

Next, we had Jeff discuss the resources on campus that will help our groups bring our ideas to life. Jeff is the head of the CU FabLab by the agriculture library that I was able to visit last week for research. He even highlighted one of the master’s students that I spoke to when I visited! Overall, his space and his team have a lot of different tools and expertise to share with our teams to complete our projects. Most interestingly, Jeff touched on the new Center for Design that is being built behind the Business Instructional Facility. It will be very interesting to hear about how that new space helps tie together students from across campus and bring attention to all of the awesome resources.

Lastly, we began a brainstorming activity that revolved around storytelling. From our research last week, we discussed the different emotions and motivations that go into the opportunity our team is presenting on. In the end, we had four categories filled with various activities and emotions that all connect to our project with Jenna to make sure she can participate in all aspects of yoga.

The final result of our brainstorming exercise.

Lastly, our group was able to conduct more research toward the end of the week. On Saturday, I was able to meet with an ARC yoga instructor. She is a senior who has been teaching yoga classes since her freshman year. She had a lot of great insight overall on how our solution needs to fit with the flow of classes, and the different varieties of yoga that exist. Additionally, she noted a story of a woman with a prosthetic who she had had in a few of her classes over the years. This woman had similar balance issues to Jenna, and needed to adapt a lot of the poses to fit her. She had also illustrated a story of how she was a swimmer. When she swims, she wears a flipper on her prosthetic to help even out the power of her legs. She noted that with the flipper on, her balance while walking around the pool deck was improved because of the increased surface area and flexibility. This is incredibly applicable to the opportunity we are addressing with Jenna and I was very excited to share this with her at our meeting today (Sunday). Jenna gave us a ton of helpful information and deeper perspective on this opportunity, and really loved the flipper story. We are excited to start designing for this issue as she would love to use/wear our solution to all of her yoga classes if all goes well!

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Week 5: Inspiration and New Discoveries

This week started with presentations from 4 speakers. One from Illini Service Dogs, one from John Hornick, another from Jeff Ginger, and last from our TA Mehmet Aydin.

Illini Service Dogs spoke about challenge areas and resources available to continue exploring this challenges. Since for privacy issues it is hard to get a chance to observe actual training, it was useful to hear of different ways research can still be gathered. This can be transferred to all of our projects even if we aren’t working with ISD, as a good reminder that we don’t have to be confined to our mentors for research and also think out of the box to interview people who might have different insights and provide a different perspective. I have a friend who works at Beckwith Residential Services, so my team is planning to reach out to him for an interview.

John Hornick walked us through the scope of 3D printing and reminded us how big of a field it is. It was inspiring to hear all the different projects that have used 3D printing because it is easy to forget how powerful this tool really is.

Jeff Ginger talked about his experience making as well as the Fab Lab. I have visited the Fab Lab several times because because I was first introduced to it through a class freshman year. Since then I’ve gone back to make laptop stickers as the VP Community Service of my business fraternity, and to make a shirt through a developmental workshop with Design for America. One thing he brought up that really stood out to me was the idea of DIWO. Do it with others is an important way to look at design because these kinds of spaces makes it easy to work with others who have different backgrounds and learn from each other.

Finally our TA Mehmet spoke about design from a broader view, talking about the total experience. He discussed the MRI scanners used in hospitals, and how kids were afraid of going in them. He shared that after making them themed in a fun way like a pirate theme, kids were more willing to go inside. This was a great example to hear especially because they didn’t reinvent a product, yet they still changed an experience. This is related to what we’re trying to do in adding a little more joy into our experts lives, and this example is a good learning lesson to how that can be done without changing the core of the product.

He shared that after making them themed in a fun way like a pirate theme, kids were more willing to go inside. This was a great example to hear especially because they didn’t reinvent a product, yet they still changed an experience. This is related to what we’re trying to do in adding a little more joy into our experts lives, and this example is a good learning lesson to how that can be done without changing the core of the product.

We ended the day with an exercise to organize our insights and find an opportunity area from them. My team did 2 interviews last week, so we were synthesizing the insights we got from both of our interviewees.

We came up with multiple categories ranging from school/work life to personal life. After discussing our insights with one of my team members Huan, I discovered an area of interest that I am curious to explore more which is independence. A lot of tasks our users can already do but it requires another person as well. We originally were looking to explore multitasking but I think another element of that is being able to do things by yourself.