Author: AJ Poe

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.
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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.  

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If It’s Not Broke, Use It To Create Something New

Walking the same path I’ve anxiously trudged many a time before, I felt a little bit disappointed. I had signed up for this digital making course to learn new things and find ways to stay curious in my field. Yet, everything we had done so far was so familiar to me: the slight sweat building up from the far walk to the DRES testing center, the awkward stillness of its lobby, and quickly redirected glances to avoid eye contact with the strangers you’ve been thrown together with in the class; all of this was familiar. What was unfamiliar was our descent from the first floor to the wheelchair sports training room and the brief retelling of the history of wheelchair sports told to us by our mentor, Adam. What was unfamiliar was learning about how someone who had taken the same class as us mere years ago now had a multinational company whose product had made a significant impact on sports technology. It was incredible learning each individual mentor’s story and the way they made the most out of what they had, using existing technology in unique ways to not just make a profit, but make an impact. Hearing about Jenna and Ron’s struggle to become an athlete, I couldn’t help but relate to the yearning they experienced, having had to stop my own sport, track, due to chronic shin splints.

An idea for using track spikes and rubber soles to create a lighter shoe with traction came from Jenna’s trouble with the black ice on campus.

This is all to say that the whole experience of interviewing experts with experience in disability related products was an especially empathetic and inspiring experience for me. Throughout the course of the interviews, their emphasis on affordability and accessibility inspired many ideas in me to help solve not only problems they brought up about physical disabilities but also problems that my friends and I – who have mental disabilities – experience daily. Given the stigma against such disabilities, the budget constraints of helpful projects tend to be lacking; what really sparked my brain in the interview was all the ways that the experts we talked to innovated creatively through utilizing existing objects and ideas to create solutions to completely unrelated problems. As a business major interested in consulting, this emphasis in cost effective innovative solutions is a particularly interesting mentality that I will carry with me into future problem-solving situations. I had been thinking of innovation in terms of creating new things completely from scratch, but moving forward, I will be keeping the ideal of adapting old inventions to newer and more modern, salient products.