Month: February 2019

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Defining Opportunities

Temperatures colder than Antarctica don’t stop us from innovating! This week’s class was different from most–due to inclement weather, we held class virtually. We were accompanied by Milestone Labs, who ran a workshop on design thinking and led us through how to convert our opportunities into tangible ideas to move forward with.

Over webcam, each team presented a mentor who we visited during Week 2 who inspired them and potential opportunities they could explore with said mentor. My team and I chose to move forward with the opportunity of designing a tread that facilitates walking on snow and ice for people who utilize prosthetic legs. With the guidance of Milestone Labs, we created an opportunity statement. We started by analyzing the audience, the limitations, other people involved, the environment, and usability of our opportunity. From this analysis, we synthesized our opportunity into the following statement: To create detachable tread attachments that can be used to travel in a variety of terrains.

Initially, our idea was to create a lightweight, affordable tread that could be used in snow and ice. After our workshop with Milestone Labs and speaking with Jenna, we learned that it is difficult to walk on sand and other terrains in addition to snow and ice. Thus, our new opportunity statement expands our audience to people, prosthetic users or not, who find difficulty walking in different terrains. For example, we even discussed how we could create a tread for people who wear heels in the winter time. This made me realize the difficulty that I personally have walking in different terrains. If we successfully create this new tread, or multiple treads, it could potentially benefit every walking person. And not only that, but the tread could also be applied to wheels. I look forward to next week to see the project start coming to life!

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Week 3 Reflection

This week due to the weather, we had a virtual class. I was very excited to use Zoom and I believe the session was still productive despite the weather setback.

I really enjoyed the presentation and feedback from milestone labs. They showed us how to examine opportunities we found in our daily lives and to determine the design need. A great example was one girl shared how she kept losing her keys. Therefore, she decided to put her keys on a hair tie and keep it around her wrist. I too did the same thing last year when I kept losing my keys. I had never even realized this was a design opportunity and how I had come up with an innovative solution to the problem.

Picture showing key on a hair tie (found on google images).

I also really liked learning about assistive devices. I had never before considered how glasses were an assistive device. Other great examples mentioned by my classmates were hearing aids and walkers. It was interesting to see how sometimes a design hack can easily become to universally accepted design. The example given to us by milestone labs was the hack of putting tennis balls on the bottom of walkers. This soon became the accepted design and products entered the market for walkers that were modeled after tennis balls.

I think the presentation by milestone labs gave us a lot of great ideas to consider when moving forward with our project. One of my big takeaways was a design can almost always be improved. Milestone did a great job of pointing out how people come up with design hacks daily and just because these hacks work, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily the best version. We shared our preliminary ideas with milestone labs and one of our ideas was creating a wheelchair cup holder or phone holder. We had initially had this idea however, we conducted some research and realized there were already a lot of products on the market. However, milestone encourage us to ask our mentors how helpful these products were because there is always room for improvement.

Moving forward, our team will be focusing on an idea that Arielle (our preferred mentor) brought to our attention. We will be trying to improve an athlete’s grip on the hand ring of the racing wheelchairs under difficult weather conditions. Specifically, the example we were given was if an athlete is racing in the rain the grip can become slippery and this provides unfavorable conditions. We will be looking to work with multiple textures and we will have to find a way to put a cover on both the top of the hand ring and the sides.

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Milestone Labs Reflection

Week 3 had a much different look to it as we were iced in due to abnormally horrible winter conditions, but fortunately Milestone Labs and Professor Sachdev were still able to get together and video stream the course. All in all, it was a very enlightening experience which forced us to think about how to approach the design thinking process in accordance with the scope of DRES. This directly tied in with the videos we watched on human centered design.

Milestone ultimately pushed to make decisions – which is huge. Ideation can be an everlasting process, but if there is no action taken, then it will be difficult to see the fruits of your labor. Our collaborative activity brought an additional level of clarity to our project scope. It forced us to brainstorm and prioritize our ideas based on feasibility and look at the impact each could make. We do not want to make flashy devices; we want to make utilitarian products.


Ultimately, I think we moved from the design challenge phase and began planning early stage research methods. Through the guidance and discussion, our group decided that it would be best to pursue the IKEA styled model for wheelchairs. We figured that the best entry point would be to find whichever component is either most frequently or most expensive to replace as this will provide the most lucrative business opportunity while having the biggest impact.

After the online seminar, we are now more confident going forward and can delve right into our work next week. Ron will need to help us in discussing the consistency of wheelchair parts, however if we can find a component which is consistent throughout all models, then that will probably be the better we will attempt to model and 3D print.

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Week 2 Reflection

I registered BADM357 a week ago. Therefore, I didn’t get the chance to visit DRES. However, after reading all the materials and everyone else’s blog, I realized this course can provide us lots of opportunities to explore more. I would never have a chance to visit DRES if I don’t take this class, and I would never know mentors’ fantastic stories and how those athletes train their bodies. By sharing personal experience to each other, we can gain more knowledge in different fields and we can learn more about others as a person.

By reading through other students’ posts, I found out that 3D printing techniques are benefiting lots of people in need, such as the 3D printed gloves. It makes me feel more inspired and more stimulated to learn about different techniques, such as modeling, 3D printing, and prototyping, in order to help other people and make their life better.

Even though I did’t go the first two weeks’ classes, I’m trying to catch up you guys’ pace. I’m really excited to do something that would help others. I’m also really looking forward to cooperating with my teammates and reach our goals. Hope we can have a good time!

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Milestone Labs: Defining the Opportunity

Wednesday’s class was a bit unorthodox; with plunging temperatures, our session with Milestone Studio Labs was held virtually. The presenters did a great job of synthesizing their approach to problems and making it applicable to the work we had done so far.

Milestone Studio Labs takes a problem defining approach when designing products. By digging deeply into the problem, they are able to understand what the solution should be to a greater degree. Empathetic design can be very difficult when you have never experienced the issues that you are trying to solve. The presenters had us focus our attention on the opportunity at hand: what were the experiences and stories around the problem. This approach kept us from leaping to possible solutions too quickly without fully understanding the problem.

The presenters showed a very interesting example of this when a team designed a solution for a blind woman who had developed tremors. While the team designed a very elaborate hat that would basically do the job of the walking stick, they missed clear opportunities for small improvements in her daily life. A yogurt cup holder was one example of how they had listened and understood the problem, then not overthought the solution.

I think this point will be very important to keep in mind throughout the course. Some problems can have both elaborate and simple solutions. With the focus on affordability stressed during our visit to DRES, I think keeping solutions as simple as possible, even utilizing common materials, would be most effective for our solutions.

Our team worked on framing the opportunity regarding Jenna’s balance difficulties. While she had suggested a possible solution would be a greater surface area of her prosthetic foot, it could be that a strap for her to put her foot under or some other solution could be better. So it is important for our team to keep in mind what the opportunity is and define that as best as we can before we jump to different solutions.

It’s also important to keep in mind that as you create a solution for one opportunity it may be used for others. Although we focused on the application of balance in yoga during class, whatever solution we find may find may have other audiences and uses as well!

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Digging Deeper Into Our Ideas – Week 3 Reflection

Learning From the Experts

Class went on as scheduled this week, even in the midst of the polar vortex sweeping across the Midwest. The class started with learning the logistics of the video chat software we were using, and after that, we moved into a presentation by representatives from Milestone Studios. One of the main points I took away from their presentation was how important it was to design a product that would actually be useful for the user. They told a story of a product they had worked on in the past for a user who was blind. In their initial brainstorm stage, they designed a prototype headgear motion sensor that would help their partner move around her apartment. However, when they talked with her they found that she had little trouble moving around her apartment, but what she really struggled with was not knocking her yogurt over when eating it. They were able to develop a simple yogurt stabilizing base that helped solve her problem and improved her quality of life. This tangible example helped underscore the importance of Human-Centered Design and interviews in the design process.

Assessing Our Ideas

After the presentation from Milestone Studios, each team presented on a few of their potential ideas and the mentors they wanted to work with. I had come in with the assumption that many of the teams would have noticed the same problems as our team and brainstormed similar solutions. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of the needs seen and the potential ideas given to address them. After sharing our thoughts, we broke back up into teams to think more critically about our ideas using the Challenge Definition. I really appreciated this exercise because it forced us to define our opportunity and our solution. Working with Jenna and the members of Milestone Studios we were able to define our opportunity statement as “We want to protect Jenna’s leg, while still maintaining or even improving her full range of motions.” This statement challenges us not just to protect Jenna’s knee, but also make sure we are not providing her a solution that limits her in some other way. Doing this will ensure that Jenna will actually use our solution instead of forgoing it because of any other negative effects it might have. Overall, this class was very informative and it was great working with the representatives from Milestone Studies!

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A (Polar) Vortex of Ideas

CLASS STILL TOOK PLACE DESPITE THE POLAR VORTEX.

I woke up early on Wednesday morning and put on at three layers of clothing in preparation for our polar vortex modified class this week. And while it was cold, it was definitely a fruitful experience. We met representatives from Milestone Studios, a company focused on making a social impact with the products they innovate. During our workshop with them, we presented our inspirations and ideas from the previous week, and they talked us through the development and defining of our ideas. We had breakout sessions where we fleshed out our idea of an attachable tread for prosthetics users which will allow them to traverse many different rough terrains, and our mentor Jenna even popped into the video chat for a bit to answer our questions.

When Jenna joined our communications, we followed the advice given to us in our readings from the previous week and utilized our time well to interview Jenna on the many intricacies we were curious to know more about. We let Milestone Studios’ Challenge Definition chart guide our thinking and help us identify the topics we were hoping to get more information about from a field expert such as Jenna. We opened up with some general questions and moved onto more specifics from the original responses to narrow down our ideas to the infeasible, feasible, and actually useful.

ZOOMING FORWARD IN THE INNOVATION PROCESS.

What I learned from this session was that while blind inspiration is incredible, what is more useful is using said inspiration to create something usable. Like when Milestone Studios discovered that a blind stroke patient just needed a method to not drop her yoghurt and eat instead of a complex product which helps her get around, along with my team, I learned this week that we should ultimately keep in mind the users’ needs in innovation. During our breakout session, we brainstormed and discarded many different ways to create the tread, settling on an attachable tread which would be able to help the most amount of users in the most amount of situations, not just midwestern prosthetic users struggling with icy surfaces.

From this experience, I am excited to narrow down our ideas further into a usable product. I am ready to face the future challenges with a mentality of user first rather than what I personally think is coolest or most unique. I am eager to research more into our product idea and the logistics of implementing it.