Author: Ryan Kane

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.

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.

EarthSense, Inc.

This week in class we had the opportunity to listen to a University of Illinois Alumni, Mike Hansen. Mike studied Industrial Design here at the University of Illinois and now currently works out of research park as a Freelance Designer for EarthSense, Inc. Mike began his talk going in-depth on what EarthSense does as a company. EarthSense is a “true start-up” with under 10 employees that work tirelessly to develop their machine learning, artificial intelligence, and robotics to assist farmers in gathering data to better understand their crops. EarthSense’s mission is to create an easier way for farmers to understand the health of their crops without having to bust their backs and rummage through the dirt to gather the information they need. After the background of the company, Mike told us more about his job as an industrial designer for these products that are always being developed and innovated. With a product that is on the frontier of innovation in this market, Mike is always making and altering aspects of the design to the robot. Since Mike does so much iteration with his designs he told us about the importance of his 3D printing skills. With 3D printing, Mike is able to conjure up ideas and create a physical product to test in fractions of the time for fractions of the price. Mike helped me really helped me understand not only the importance of iteration when developing a product but also being willing to fail often and fast.

Building a Brand

For the remainder of class Professor Vishal tasked our teams to come up with a team name and logo. My team and I really had some fun creating our brand. When trying to figure out the name for our company we tried to go with a name that related to fluidity and movement. After twenty or so minutes of deliberations, we decided on MOVI. MOVI is short for “moving” because beyond our one product we want our brand to represent motion, so we can help all with prosthetics move better. When thinking about our logo we decided to go with a triangle. The reason we wanted to do a triangle was that triangles are the strongest shape in the world. It is a symbol of strength and structure and when creating our products, we want our brand to represent fluidity and strength. After we created our name and logo we had our first opportunity to work with the 3D printers. It was a lot of fun designing our brand and seeing a physical copy of our idea no more than 30 minutes later.

Meeting with Jenna

In our meeting with Jenna, we were able to get a head start on gaining a user perspective on our product. Before we decided to move forward with our project we need to make sure this was a product she not only felt like she needed but also wanted. Our protective knee pad needs to have important specifications to fill the requirements of a useful product. We talked about the importance of compatibility, light-weight, easy attaching and detaching. Finally, to gauge interest in potential future consumers, we wanted to bring a customizability aspect into the product. Since we will be 3D printing our product, we had an idea of engraving tattoos and designs into the protective cover. Moving forward, we need to get a scan of Jenna’s leg to be able to get accurate measurements for our design. I am looking forward to our progress on our project and designs in this upcoming week.

As we started to really begin to dive into our projects the weather decided to do everything in its power to slow down our innovation. Luckily, our class was able to meet and work with Milestone Labs to further develop our projects. I was really excited to put our ideas in front of the eyes of some professionals. As last week got underway our group was able to discuss and organize our wild ideas into three separate groups. We decided to break our project into a protection pad for Jenna’s knee, a waterproofing sleeve, and a stabilizing footplate. After talking with Milestone Labs, we decided to narrow our focus and place most of our efforts into the protective knee pad. With this direction, I really believe after talking with Jenna we can really make a tangible difference in her everyday life as well. Looking forward I believe that it is very important for my group and I to place a timeline, so we can start prototyping our design for Jenna to test out. I’m excited to see what our project has in store moving forward.

Personally, I have never been in a class where I have been able to interact and physically design solution for issues that people face every day. One of my favorite thing Professor Sachdev said day one was, “We are not looking to solve problems, but we are looking to find opportunities”. I thought that this was an amazing way to look at innovation that I have never noticed before.

To begin our initial discovery of our semester projects we took a trip to the Disability Resource & Educational Service. We initially began our research as Adam took us around a tour of the wheel chair training facility. On this tour Adam really helped us understand the accomplishments of all these fantastic athletes. Adam took us to the back of his shop and showed us the 3D printed gloves and other or his very own inventions to help train his decorated athletes.

After the tour, we went to a meeting room where our entire class was able to hear the fantastic stories of Ron, Ryan, and Jenna. Since I have never been in a class or consulting project like this I thought it was really amazing to hear first-hand accounts of living with a disability. Ron, Ryan and Jenna’s stories were all vastly different but all inspired and connected with me to want to make a change.

After we heard first-hand stories, my partner Jay and I talked to Jenna slightly more in-depth to get some more information about her. One of her concerns had to do with her $100 thousand leg. After our conversation, Jay and I started drafting some ideas on some of the opportunities that Jenna provided us. I’m very excited to see what the semester has in store for us!