Author: Maryam Siddique

Gies College of Business || May 2019 Supply Chain Management & Information Systems/Information Technology
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[Week 4] Evinco

This week we focused on learning Tinkercad and gaining exposure to 3D printing. Due to my experience in MakerGirl, I had worked with Tinkercad before and I was very excited to design our group name and logo! My group has Arielle as our mentor and she named her company Ingenium which is the latin word for ability or genius. We therefore decided to also name our group after a latin word. We picked Evinco which means to prevail or win!

For our logo, we had the idea to model it after a racing stripe or a lightning bolt. We ended up combining those ideas and designing a logo that was similar to a car manufacturer. Below is a picture of our logo 3D printing and the finished product!

3D printer in action
Finished logo

The article we read before class this week mentioned tips and methods for conducting a good interview. One of the tips was to take a guided tour of a person’s space to best identify how to design a product for them. We found this idea really helpful and reached out to Arielle and Adam to see if they would have time to meet with us on Friday. Adam invited us to come by the DRES building Friday at 8am during the team’s practice time! This was a mixture between a guided tour, interview and peers observing peers. We were able to gain a much better understand for our project and we are now confident moving forward that we will be able to design a product to achieve our opportunity statement.

Opportunity Statement: To help athlete’s improve the grip on their ring when racing in undesirable weather conditions.

I wanted to include some of my notes and takeaways from our visit on Friday. The first thing that was helpful to learn was that the hand ring is re-gripped about every 3 months. The ring is unscrewed from the wheel and a tire tubing is placed around the ring. Contact cement is used to attach the tubing and it is heat activated for a heat gun has to be used to pull the tubing off. It is about a 4 hour process to change the grip and it has to dry for a day. Elisa asked if there was a company that changed the grips and we were all shocked to find that there was none. All the athletes have to learn to change the grip themselves and some of them will even pay their other team members to do it for them.

Here is a picture of the wheel. The hand ring is the smaller circle in the middle.
Here is the tire tubbing that is used to cover the hand ring.

Another interesting consideration is each athlete pushes on the hand ring slightly differently. Therefore, we are going to try to create a product that can be modified based on the athlete who is using it. We have expanded our initial ideas to include modifications to the glove instead of just modifications to the hand ring. It was really interesting to watch the athlete’s practice and I wanted to include a slow motion video I took of one of the athletes. You can really see his stroke which is something Arielle and Adam both tried to explain to us. First the athlete, starts by pushing on the top of the handring however, during the stroke the grip changes toward the inner part of the ring.

This is the video of one of the athletes. I couldn’t compress the file enough to get it to post on the blog. Here is a link to our google drive where I have uploaded the video. Link is below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qUhGohaYYJ7vcRGZhHt_RulwLldJPdEr/view?usp=sharing

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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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Week 2 Reflection

This weeks class was very exciting and informative. I really enjoyed visiting the DRES building and I am hoping to be given a project working with one of the mentors that I met on Wednesday. When the Illini Service Dogs visited us during the first class it was really exciting. But I struggled trying to come up with ideas for potential design projects. I have never had a dog or an animal so it was hard to me to empathize and think creatively with respect to potential products.

The visit on Wednesday to DRES helped me to start coming up with tangible ideas for our prototyping, design project. For example, we were able to see gloves that were designed by Arielle for athletes in the paralympic sport of wheelchair racing. Arielle created a company that now sells the gloves to athletes all over the world and she is able to customize them for many different hand sizes. It was really interesting to hear how the gloves are ordered and made. To order the gloves, customers scan pictures of their hands and email them to Arielle. Arielle then puts the pictures into a software where she can easily customize and then print the gloves. The gloves also have a rubber part that is glued on and can be easily changed by the customers.

I was excited to hear about the another idea she has for her company where the gloves could interact with a casing on the wheel of the chair. This glove would then be able to provide statistics and data for the athletes that could help them to train.

Another idea would be to create an app that would help customers when they are submitting an order. The app could have an outline to show customers how to take pictures of their hand.

Pictures of the glove designed by Arielle
Another view of the glove
Another view of the glove

I also was thinking a lot about the videos we watched for class and this visit helped me with empathy. The video mentioned how for human centered design, it is helpful to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and understand their perspective. This visit helped me to understand the perspectives of the athlete’s and I think this will help me immensely in the future when designing for our project. Empathy however is still something that I am working on. The video mentioned leaving behind “preconceived ideas” and this is one part that I believe will be difficult. Sometimes when I am given the idea for a project, I start to brainstorm design ideas and I find it really easy to become attached to an idea. However, I am realizing during this process that it is better to be open to possibilities rather than to hone in on a specific design idea.