Yingyi Wu

February 10, 2019February 10, 2019

Week 4: First Touch in 3D Printing in the Course

Inspiration to Ideation

Inspiration continues and shifts toward the ideation phase this week. Starting with a pre-class research plan, we developed the opportunity statement into a complete research plan. We spent a lot of time thinking about the various contacts we could reach to learn more about how to turn our idea of opportunity into a real product. Much more details and research is needed around the areas we have almost no experience in – the life of wearing a prosthetic leg and practicing yoga. We must first confirm that what we learned from Jenna in our first group interview was something actionable. Therefore, we decided to contact Jenna this week, but we just got in contact with her yesterday and had not yet asked her the questions we have in plan. After learning from Jenna, we would like to learn the restrictions in yoga that may prevent our target users from achieving the goal of reaching balance in yoga. Last week, I found a link about the organization that teaches yoga to people with prosthetic legs. If we can get into contact with this organization, I think our learning about yoga and prosthetic legs can be much deeper.

Learning from Failures

This week in class, a guest speaker, Mike Hansen, from EarthSense came to give a presentation on the ideation and creation process of their products. During the presentation, I found a few things that are exceptionally inspiring. He talked about the numerous failures of design models that he had for the camera cap. In this sense, I found that it is extremely important to rapidly try out the ideas in prototypes and not afraid of failures because every failure brings a new lesson learned and allows us to improve the product design. I also found it useful to allow early stage user feedback to improve on the product.

Early stage users of EarthSense product, different things that EarthSense can improve on

First 3D Printed Product – Team Logo

This week in class, we were asked to come up with a team name and logo. As inspired by our team’s opportunity statement, we decided to have a team name that represents a 3D product created for balance, so we named ourselves as 3D Bal, which Bal stands for balance.

3D Printing record: Halfway through printing the entire logo

We used tinkercad.com for the 3D design of the model and added lots of supports before cleaning. Looking at the logo being printed, it feels like a baby is coming to life. Even though this is not the first time I 3D printed an object, the feeling of excitement was still there.

3D Printed logo With Supports

After printing, I cleaned out most of the supports, but there are a few supports in the alphabets “B” and “a” that I was unable to clean out due to their sizes are too small. I am excited about our actual product design.

3D Printed Logo after cleaning out most supports

Yingyi Wu

I am a student who’s currently studying accountancy and management of information systems. I am graduating this year and entering the MAS program at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. I love programming and accountancy as much as I love taking photographs and learning how to play the Rubik’s cube. I love trying out new things and learning new skills. Learning how to make accessible designs utilizing digital making skills is one of the new skills I learned.

February 3, 2019

Week 3: Exploring and Defining Opportunities

Pre Class

Week 3. This week to me is kind of mind-blowing. Starting from the pre-class readings, I started to feel regret of the previous group interview. With the time constraint, I did not get a chance to ask more in-depth questions as I would like to have a more in-depth understanding of the mentors’ experiences. I did not capture most of the things I see through photo during the site visit. Prior to reading the HCD reading, I did not notice the importance of capturing the things I see, hear, feel, smell and taste during the site visit. But I think there things that I did well from the previous week that allows me to define the opportunities from experts’ experiences, including listening patiently and taking good notes of mentors’ inspiring experiences that I heard. When there is a chance for us to have a more in-depth interview again with the expert who we are working with, I would start to apply the techniques I read from the reading to deepen my understanding of the situation and better define the opportunities available.

Milestone Labs Workshop

With the extreme weather of the past week, unfortunately, our face-to-face class time is canceled. Instead, we had an interesting online session. I really love how the consultants from the Milestone Labs guided us through the steps for design thinking to inspire us to get to our final opportunity statement. Starting with the discussion of the unmet social needs, I was shocked by how we, people, are so creative in overcoming the small problems that come into our lives and how simple the solution can be. Without complicated technology, each one of us can find a very simple solution to the challenges we faced during our daily lives. During the brainstorming session, I thought of something that I usually do when I am drinking hot water with a glass. I did not have any cup holders at home. When I wanted to drink hot water or tea, the cup got very hot. To solve this problem, I just grabbed a tissue to serve the purpose of a cup holder. The tissue absorbed some of the heat, so my hand did not get burned when I was holding the cup. I was so shocked when I thought of my real life example. I never realized, prior to this class session, that I was so creative in the way of making simple solutions to overcome my daily challenges.

After the brainstorming of unmet needs, we shared our desired mentors as a team. Before class, we were struggling in choosing a mentor and narrowing the opportunities down to one. During the presentation, we were inspired by the consultants from the Milestone Labs who seemed very excited about our idea of making a product that improves the balance of people with a prosthetic leg for recreational use, particularly in yoga, that can also expand to daily usage. Therefore, we went forward with defining this single opportunity. Going through the opportunity worksheet, we finally got to a single sentence opportunity statement:

To create an extension for prosthetic legs to increase balance, particularly in yoga.

Our idea of getting a surface area extension to help with balancing with the prosthetic leg is new that I did not find any related products online, but I found some benefits of doing yoga to people with prosthetic legs (you may click on this link to view more information regarding the benefits). With the benefits of yoga and our product to help make the more practices in yoga possible for people with prosthetic legs, we can encourage people with prosthetic legs to practice yoga and gain confidence in working out. I am excited with the opportunity we defined, and I hope to bring this idea to reality to encourage people with prosthetic legs to practice yoga and other excercises.

Yingyi Wu

January 26, 2019

Week2: Learning From the Experts

This was my first time walking into the DRES facility. When I walked into this building, I knew that my journey of discovery of opportunities started.

Tour

The beginning of this journey started with a tour of the DRES building. We went underground to the athletes’ practice room, which was also a museum of a collection of generations of racing wheelchairs. We also visited Adam’s “MakerLab” and learned about Arielle’s story of her 3D-printed gloves for athletes.

First Generation of Gloves
Newest Generation 3D-Printed Gloves

From the first generation that could easily cause hand injuries to the high-cost second generation of gloves to the new, cheap 3D-printed gloves. This transition of products being used by wheelchair tracking athletes reminds me about a book I previously read, Are Your Lights On. In this book, there was a chapter called “Missing the misfit”. The chapter illustrates the importance to find the misfit, which is a solution that produces a mismatch with human beings who have to live with the solution, and come up with a solution to deal with the misfit. However, misfits are usually hard to recognize because humans are very adaptable creatures that we can live with the misfit until we realize that we didn’t have to live that way.

Before the second generation of gloves, wheelchair tracking athletes had no problems with living with the first generation of gloves that would cause hand injuries. Before the 3D-printed gloves, wheelchair tracking athletes used the expensive second generation of gloves with no problems too. But when 3D-printed gloves came to live, people recognized that they didn’t need to race and practice with the previous generations of gloves. Arielle’s successful story helped me realize the importance of looking carefully from life experiences to find opportunities that could improve our life experiences. This can lead to a long-lasting positive impact on our society.

Expert Users Interview

The roundtable interview started with Professor Sachdev’s overview of the goals of this digital making seminar course. Digital fabrication. Quick prototyping. Human-centered design. Learning how to be empathetic. Finding opportunities within different people’s life experiences to help improve the quality of life in society. These are all big goals that I had never thought about for digital making. But on this day, I learned at least a few from the experts’ stories.

Without listening to the experts’ stories, I could never imagine the life of a person with a disability of mobility. I would never know that a person with a disability of mobility can still go back to the life they used to have. I always felt pity to people who need to move with their wheelchairs or prosthetic legs because I thought that their life would become very inconvenient and lost a lot of fun. However, after hearing Ron and Jenna’s stories, I realized the danger of making assumptions about the life that I had no prior experience.

Ron had fun with wheelchair even after he was able to walk after two years of learning. Jenna was happy with her prosthetic leg that allows her to play volleyball, basketball, and track like everyone else. Arielle started with her idea of 3D printed gloves to her business to working with a charity to make wheelchairs affordable and accessible to people in need in Africa.

After taking away my bias, I realized that there are many people in the world who need us to design products that can solve the misfits that they are currently facing but not realizing. 65 millions of people in the world still do not have access to wheelchairs that they need. There are many things we can design for them to solve their challenges. How could we utilize what’s available to make wheelchairs or other products affordable and accessible to people in need? This question is extremely important for us to consider. When I was thinking about product opportunities, I started to imagine if we could 3D print the wheelchairs locally in their components and assemble the components like how people 3D printed houses. Even though the wheelchairs could be huge, their components are relatively small. As a result, people in poor areas could also 3D print the components and assemble them to serve their needs. This product design idea might not be perfect, but the inspiration I gained from the experts’ stories was material.

Yingyi Wu