Category: Week3

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Finding Challenges, Defining Opportunities

Though we faced freezing weather that blocked the class from meeting in person, it did not stop us from continuing to explore the inspirations that we encountered the past week. With the representatives of the Milestone Studio Labs on a video conference with the class, we continued to brainstorm as a team regarding several ideas that we thought would improve someone else’s quality of life. From the stories that our mentors shared, we realized the significance of affordability and accessibility, which is why we decided that those two factors will be the center of our design. Whatever it was that we were designing, we wanted to ensure that it would be accessible to the people who we were designing for.

With that in mind, my team and I came up with three ideas that we possibly would want to explore further throughout the semester:

  1. Snow/sand tracks for wheelchairs
  2. DIY wheelchair
  3. Shock-absorbing wheelchair

These ideas were inspired by the mentors and the stories that they shared last week. Although with their experience and knowledge, they are able to find ways to get around these problems, we wanted to make the process easier for them. As our professor emphasized, we were not trying to solve their problems. We wanted to help with improving the process and making it easier.

Example of a wheelchair sand track (source)
Example of a shock-absorbing wheelchair (source)

When we shared these ideas with the representatives of Milestone Studio Labs, they were very supportive, providing constructive feedbacks that raised our confidence. However, what I found to be even more helpful came after that. They pushed us, as a team, to identify an opportunity that we wanted to explore and design for. That is when I realized that without having a clear goal, the opportunity that we are pursuing after, we would not be able to design an effective product. I was ready to jump into designing a product when we haven’t even defined clearly the opportunity that we were hoping to address with the idea.

To identify an opportunity that we wanted to explore as a team, we went back to our core factors: accessibility and affordability. That is ultimately what we really wanted to provide for the people in need of a wheelchair. For this reason, we decided to explore the DIY wheelchair idea further. We wanted the users to be able to customize and replace the parts of a wheelchair as necessary. However, we also recognize the challenge with this idea. With the time and resources allotted to us, we probably will not be able to create a whole DIY wheelchair, which is why we are looking to begin with a part of a wheelchair that commonly requires a replacement. To identify such a part, we will need to do more research and talk with our mentors to gain an understanding, but now that we have the opportunity that we want to explore clearly defined, I am looking forward to where the design will lead to.

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Week 3 Reflection

Due to the weather condition, we did a online session with the Milestone Labs and Professor Vishal. We used this program called Zoom and it was a enlightening experience for each group and it changed my mind in approaching our project.

I really loved how Milestone guided us through making our project step by step. Today, we went through ideation which I feel like it’s one of the most key steps when it comes to designing. As an industrial designer, we were told that the best design is when we have achieved to fulfill the needs of our target audience. Products that looks aesthetic and has no purpose is a terrible design because no one will use them. So, I really love how Milestone pushed us to collaborate between our groups through activities to clarify our target audience and project scope. Our group mostly focused on the need of the user and the feasibility that comes out from it.

With the help of Milestone Labs, we came to a conclusion to make a knee cap for people who are using prosthetic legs. We discussed that most prosthetic legs that have knee caps or protect them are four times more expensive than the ones without it. And with the help of our mentor, Jenna, we will further explore to minimize the cost and weight of the cap, so other people will be able to use it as well. This way, our product will be sustainable in the business as well.

Thanks to the online seminar, I feel like our group is much more confident going into week 4. Our mentor Jenna will help us figure out the dimensions of her prosthetic leg and try out our prototypes to find the best model. We will make 3d models of the buckle that goes around the knee, but we will try to make the cap using other cushion materials.

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Week 3 Reflection – Challenge to Make an Impact

A slide from Milestone Studios' presentation.
A slide from Milestone Studios’ presentation.

During week 3, we had an online session with Milestone Studios and our mentors to explore how to make a social impact. I was a little bit disappointed that we didn’t have the class physically, because we could have more interactions with the studio as well as our mentors if it were a face-to-face meeting. Still, I gained many insights from the class and now have a clearer view of what to do next.

We started the class by discussing unmet social needs. After seeing some examples of how people overcame those challenges, we were asked to brainstorm the problems that we had encounter in our life and how we overcame them. I was shocked by this activity. I have always considered myself to be a person who has creativity, yet during this exercise, I was unable to think of anything that fitted the criteria. I have had the cases where I identified the problems, yet the solutions that I found were usually too complicated, or I myself didn’t have the technical skill to realize them. Seeing the simple solutions in the examples, I reflected on my way of thinking. In the future, I should try harder to pinpoint the core of the problem so that I can come up with more affordable and more accessible solutions.

Another activity that led to many thoughts was writing the opportunity statement. This is related to the defining stage in the design thinking process. Two new words that I learned was analysis and synthesis. The analysis is breaking down complex problems into smaller, easier to understand pieces. The synthesis is combining small insights into whole ideas. We applied those two concepts when we created the opportunity statement. Filling in the statement, we sparked ideas that we didn’t consider before. Previously when we prepared the presentation slides, we had more plans for Ron and only a vague direction for Ryan. As we brainstormed the opportunity we could have with Ryan, we realized “improving the ability to multitask for people with limited mobility” would be an area with great potential. This idea could benefit not only people with limited mobility when they do tasks such as filming and drawing, but also the general public who may need to accomplish tasks with fewer limbs. In the class, we didn’t have the opportunity to talk with our mentor. Later, I plan to interview him in more depth. One technique that I think would be helpful is the conversation starter which we studied in the reading. I believe this would be an excellent way for us to see how our mentor reacts and we can identify more possibilities.

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Defining Opportunities

Temperatures colder than Antarctica don’t stop us from innovating! This week’s class was different from most–due to inclement weather, we held class virtually. We were accompanied by Milestone Labs, who ran a workshop on design thinking and led us through how to convert our opportunities into tangible ideas to move forward with.

Over webcam, each team presented a mentor who we visited during Week 2 who inspired them and potential opportunities they could explore with said mentor. My team and I chose to move forward with the opportunity of designing a tread that facilitates walking on snow and ice for people who utilize prosthetic legs. With the guidance of Milestone Labs, we created an opportunity statement. We started by analyzing the audience, the limitations, other people involved, the environment, and usability of our opportunity. From this analysis, we synthesized our opportunity into the following statement: To create detachable tread attachments that can be used to travel in a variety of terrains.

Initially, our idea was to create a lightweight, affordable tread that could be used in snow and ice. After our workshop with Milestone Labs and speaking with Jenna, we learned that it is difficult to walk on sand and other terrains in addition to snow and ice. Thus, our new opportunity statement expands our audience to people, prosthetic users or not, who find difficulty walking in different terrains. For example, we even discussed how we could create a tread for people who wear heels in the winter time. This made me realize the difficulty that I personally have walking in different terrains. If we successfully create this new tread, or multiple treads, it could potentially benefit every walking person. And not only that, but the tread could also be applied to wheels. I look forward to next week to see the project start coming to life!

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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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Milestone Labs Reflection

Week 3 had a much different look to it as we were iced in due to abnormally horrible winter conditions, but fortunately Milestone Labs and Professor Sachdev were still able to get together and video stream the course. All in all, it was a very enlightening experience which forced us to think about how to approach the design thinking process in accordance with the scope of DRES. This directly tied in with the videos we watched on human centered design.

Milestone ultimately pushed to make decisions – which is huge. Ideation can be an everlasting process, but if there is no action taken, then it will be difficult to see the fruits of your labor. Our collaborative activity brought an additional level of clarity to our project scope. It forced us to brainstorm and prioritize our ideas based on feasibility and look at the impact each could make. We do not want to make flashy devices; we want to make utilitarian products.


Ultimately, I think we moved from the design challenge phase and began planning early stage research methods. Through the guidance and discussion, our group decided that it would be best to pursue the IKEA styled model for wheelchairs. We figured that the best entry point would be to find whichever component is either most frequently or most expensive to replace as this will provide the most lucrative business opportunity while having the biggest impact.

After the online seminar, we are now more confident going forward and can delve right into our work next week. Ron will need to help us in discussing the consistency of wheelchair parts, however if we can find a component which is consistent throughout all models, then that will probably be the better we will attempt to model and 3D print.

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Milestone Labs: Defining the Opportunity

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!

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Digging Deeper Into Our Ideas – Week 3 Reflection

Learning From the Experts

Class went on as scheduled this week, even in the midst of the polar vortex sweeping across the Midwest. The class started with learning the logistics of the video chat software we were using, and after that, we moved into a presentation by representatives from Milestone Studios. One of the main points I took away from their presentation was how important it was to design a product that would actually be useful for the user. They told a story of a product they had worked on in the past for a user who was blind. In their initial brainstorm stage, they designed a prototype headgear motion sensor that would help their partner move around her apartment. However, when they talked with her they found that she had little trouble moving around her apartment, but what she really struggled with was not knocking her yogurt over when eating it. They were able to develop a simple yogurt stabilizing base that helped solve her problem and improved her quality of life. This tangible example helped underscore the importance of Human-Centered Design and interviews in the design process.

Assessing Our Ideas

After the presentation from Milestone Studios, each team presented on a few of their potential ideas and the mentors they wanted to work with. I had come in with the assumption that many of the teams would have noticed the same problems as our team and brainstormed similar solutions. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the variety of the needs seen and the potential ideas given to address them. After sharing our thoughts, we broke back up into teams to think more critically about our ideas using the Challenge Definition. I really appreciated this exercise because it forced us to define our opportunity and our solution. Working with Jenna and the members of Milestone Studios we were able to define our opportunity statement as “We want to protect Jenna’s leg, while still maintaining or even improving her full range of motions.” This statement challenges us not just to protect Jenna’s knee, but also make sure we are not providing her a solution that limits her in some other way. Doing this will ensure that Jenna will actually use our solution instead of forgoing it because of any other negative effects it might have. Overall, this class was very informative and it was great working with the representatives from Milestone Studies!

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A (Polar) Vortex of Ideas

CLASS STILL TOOK PLACE DESPITE THE POLAR VORTEX.

I woke up early on Wednesday morning and put on at three layers of clothing in preparation for our polar vortex modified class this week. And while it was cold, it was definitely a fruitful experience. We met representatives from Milestone Studios, a company focused on making a social impact with the products they innovate. During our workshop with them, we presented our inspirations and ideas from the previous week, and they talked us through the development and defining of our ideas. We had breakout sessions where we fleshed out our idea of an attachable tread for prosthetics users which will allow them to traverse many different rough terrains, and our mentor Jenna even popped into the video chat for a bit to answer our questions.

When Jenna joined our communications, we followed the advice given to us in our readings from the previous week and utilized our time well to interview Jenna on the many intricacies we were curious to know more about. We let Milestone Studios’ Challenge Definition chart guide our thinking and help us identify the topics we were hoping to get more information about from a field expert such as Jenna. We opened up with some general questions and moved onto more specifics from the original responses to narrow down our ideas to the infeasible, feasible, and actually useful.

ZOOMING FORWARD IN THE INNOVATION PROCESS.

What I learned from this session was that while blind inspiration is incredible, what is more useful is using said inspiration to create something usable. Like when Milestone Studios discovered that a blind stroke patient just needed a method to not drop her yoghurt and eat instead of a complex product which helps her get around, along with my team, I learned this week that we should ultimately keep in mind the users’ needs in innovation. During our breakout session, we brainstormed and discarded many different ways to create the tread, settling on an attachable tread which would be able to help the most amount of users in the most amount of situations, not just midwestern prosthetic users struggling with icy surfaces.

From this experience, I am excited to narrow down our ideas further into a usable product. I am ready to face the future challenges with a mentality of user first rather than what I personally think is coolest or most unique. I am eager to research more into our product idea and the logistics of implementing it.