Author: Samantha McClary

This week started with the finalization of our project scope: addressing the difficulty of balance for Jenna, especially when she’s doing yoga. Our team definitely rallied around this idea and we’re very excited to work with her.

In class, we had the privilege of hearing from an employee of the start-up Earthsense. He explained how his company has overcome challenges from their first version to the version they are about to release. They 3D print some of their parts, and the number of iterations he had done for certain small sections of the robot were incredible! It was great to hear about his “failures” and his experience with design thinking. It was very reassuring to hear him speak about the prints he made that once in action did not meet the user’s requirements. I think it made the approach to designing for a user less intimidating, because all of the failures help add to the end success

Also, we got to print for the first time! After learning the basics of Tinkercad, our group met up to decide on a team name. Understanding that our real goal goes beyond just the yoga application, but truly targets Jenna’s balance, we decided on the name 3D-Bal (short for balance). We thought this encompassed our goal and was a fun, easy name to stick with through the semester. We created our logo, which shows the Bal “balancing” on top of a 3D sphere (see below).

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This was the first time I had been in the MakerLab, and the first time I had ever printed something that I helped design. It was a very cool process to see the ideas in your head come to life within minutes. I think that that is the true value of 3D printers – you can immediately bring your ideas to life to understand them better in the space you are going to use them. When an object is just a 2D sketch or on a computer, it is a lot more difficult to understand the object’s intricacies. However, when you can bring a quick prototype to life, you really understand how it plays in the space that it is in.

Looking to next week, we are going to go more in-depth on our research with Jenna and other stakeholders to better understand the opportunity we are looking at from their perspectives. Hopefully this lends itself to increased design potential for our group!

Wednesday’s class was a bit unorthodox; with plunging temperatures, our session with Milestone Studio Labs was held virtually. The presenters did a great job of synthesizing their approach to problems and making it applicable to the work we had done so far.

Milestone Studio Labs takes a problem defining approach when designing products. By digging deeply into the problem, they are able to understand what the solution should be to a greater degree. Empathetic design can be very difficult when you have never experienced the issues that you are trying to solve. The presenters had us focus our attention on the opportunity at hand: what were the experiences and stories around the problem. This approach kept us from leaping to possible solutions too quickly without fully understanding the problem.

The presenters showed a very interesting example of this when a team designed a solution for a blind woman who had developed tremors. While the team designed a very elaborate hat that would basically do the job of the walking stick, they missed clear opportunities for small improvements in her daily life. A yogurt cup holder was one example of how they had listened and understood the problem, then not overthought the solution.

I think this point will be very important to keep in mind throughout the course. Some problems can have both elaborate and simple solutions. With the focus on affordability stressed during our visit to DRES, I think keeping solutions as simple as possible, even utilizing common materials, would be most effective for our solutions.

Our team worked on framing the opportunity regarding Jenna’s balance difficulties. While she had suggested a possible solution would be a greater surface area of her prosthetic foot, it could be that a strap for her to put her foot under or some other solution could be better. So it is important for our team to keep in mind what the opportunity is and define that as best as we can before we jump to different solutions.

It’s also important to keep in mind that as you create a solution for one opportunity it may be used for others. Although we focused on the application of balance in yoga during class, whatever solution we find may find may have other audiences and uses as well!

This week, we had the privilege of hearing from some incredible experts to better understand the need for new designs. These experts not only listed the shortcomings of designs for their use, but also solutions they had created along the way. In particular, Robs countless stories reminded me of the “Make-It” mindset that revolves around quick prototyping. Throughout his life, Rob had created a multitude of quick fixes to make sure he could do what he needed to do from a wheelchair or on crutches. This is similar to the origin of Ingenium, as Arielle originally printed gloves for herself and her teammates, and honed in on the design just by starting to make!

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This organized approach to meeting our experts and having informal time to interview them was very different from what I have done in other classes. In another design class, we were taught the methodology of human-centered design. Our group took the task of redesigning a shipping box to avoid pain points, such as difficulty to open for those with arthritis, lack of waterproofing, ability to be stolen, etc. For a look into this previous project, you can check out our “final project pitch” here. However, to gather information of pain points from the user group, we just used our own knowledge and created a survey based off of that. The limitations with a survey is that you have to know what to ask to get good information.

With a roundtable discussion like we had in class, the experts are able to explain their pain points themselves, and then the class was able to ask for a deeper dive on certain points to find the root of the pain point. It also puts a face to a problem. The experts we met were incredible individuals, and the fact that they encounter so many shortcomings with the designs of their tools draws on the empathetic nature of human-centered design. This empathetic mindset is crucial to solving a problem that does not impact you directly. With my previous box project, there were some pain points that I myself had encountered. However, with accessibility, I do not have personal experience so I need to draw on an empathetic mindset to be able to put myself in our experts’ shoes to design something that is not only useful but will be used.

Overall, after week 2 I am incredibly excited to start learning the tools we will be utilizing to create solutions for these awesome individuals. The ability to put our learning into action and create accessible public designs is an awesome change from my normal classes which focus on conceptual knowledge.