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.
Salutations! I’m a sophomore studying accountancy who likes to create some art on the side (yes, I’m one of those photographer/poet/all around artist people). My passion is in advocating for equity, and I probably spend a little too much time on Hulu.
I am a part of Team Solestice with Trevor Sibby and Emma Bradford.
Hi AJ,
I also agree that you should always be remembering the user’s needs when designing a product. I didn’t realize how easy it is to stray away from the initial goal of the design due to the excitement of advancement in the project. I think that is why the representatives of the Milestone Studio Labs asked us to define our opportunities before we go into the next step in the design phase. They wanted to ensure that we have a clear goal in our mind so that we continue to focus on that rather than fall into the trap of “oh, this idea sounds cool, let’s give this a try” without much consideration for the user.
One of my team’s ideas is snow/sand tracks for the wheelchairs, which sounds similar to yours, so I am very curious to see where your design leads!