Author: Ruei Kao

We started the week of by working on our research plans as well as our opportunity statements. Even though the worksheet included simple questions, it did help guide us by narrowing our research and giving us a more specific direction. We were able to identify our specific needs and the people that we needed to talk to for our product development. Our project idea itself is pretty simple yet none of the members in our groups are familiar with yoga or prosthetic limbs. So, it would be crucial for us to gather information from the experts and that is what my group has set for the coming weeks.

In class today, we had the honor to invited Mike Hansen of EarthSense to share with us his experience on product development and the importance of learning from previous failures. EarthSense is a technology company that is dedicated to developing robots that can collect measurements of crops in the field to provide farmers with information that will help when analyzing plant growth. Since EarthSense is essentially creating a new technology, they have to do a lot of trial and error when it comes to developing the robots. Mike is responsible for designing the hardware of the robots. In his presentation, he mentioned that he does a lot of prototyping when designing the outer shells of the robots. It took Mike a lot of tries to be able to figure out the perfect design and the right materials. Even then, they still had to modify the design based on user feedbacks on their first products. So, I learned that during our creation stage, we should keep asking for feedback and improve our product so that it would cater to our clients more and more.

After Mike’s presentation, we were assigned to our first 3D printing assignment. The assignment was for us to come up with our logo and then 3D prints it. I was a little nervous about the assignment since I am not known for my artistic skills. Fortunately, my teammates Yingyi and Samantha were exceptionally artistic. We decided that our name should be 3DBal with 3D indicating the 3D printing part of our product and Bal is short for the word balance representing the function of our product. Our final design of our logo included our brand name 3D Bal with the word 3D carved in a ball in the bottom and the word Bal on top.

Now that we have our logo, I am excited to move on to the next stage and work on our product.

Class this week was a little out of the usual as due to the dangerously subzero temperature as a result of the polar vortex, we had to have class through a different medium rather than in usual in-person sessions. Professor Sachdev demonstrated to us on how technology can solve problems even those imposed by mother nature by hosting class online through video telecommunication software.

However, pre-class activities were delivered through the usual method on our class website. From the videos on HCD, I learned that it is important to record the elements that inspired us during our creation phase as it would be helpful and useful to have references in the later stages. Perhaps I was too caught up in the mentors’ amazing individual stories that I forgot to take notes. Whatever the reasons were, I now know better and will for sure remember to use all the tools at my disposal to record the moments and elements that will inspire and guide my team in the future.

For our lecture this week, we were fortunate enough to be able to have consultants of Milestone Labs to help guide us on transforming our ideas into actual plans for our projects. The session was indeed interesting as the consultants encouraged us to brainstorm throughout the class and eventually, we were told to join breakout sessions with our team to further discuss our ideas based on the pre-class videos and the materials presented in class.  My team and I decided to settle on our Yoga support extension based on Jenna’s personal story. Due to her unique situation, she found it challenging when performing certain poses during her yoga class and a simple detachable attachment would solve the problem and help her find balance while performing those poses. It was reassuring to her the consultants praise our idea even though it was a simple one.  

I know that the extent of our idea may only be applicable to a small group of individuals in the world. However, this does not change the fact on how much value it can created for these individual users and add to their experience of life overall. Furthermore, I can see this project only being a starting product for a line of other gadgets that can be modified and crated for individual users to assist them in different tasks. I know that myself and my teammates are thrilled to work with our mentors for the rest of the semester and work to make our idea come to fruition.