The week we had a guest speaker from a startup here at the University’s research park called Earth Sense. Mike Hansen, an U of I alumni, gave an amazing presentation on his product development journey. He spoke of stories during his Industrial Design graduate days, the failures he had, and pretty much every problem along the way. Being an industrial designer myself, a lot of his experiences resonated with me. He talked about a system of going from 0-1000 in three intervals. Taking an idea from 0 to 1. Once you get the original prototype you go from 1 to 100, with different iterations of that concept. Finally the 100 to 1000, which is the mass production of a product. You can only imagine how many issues and minute things that intervene with this process.
A few Mike said during his presentation that stuck with me were to “ fail early and fail often”. The earlier on you fail, the quicker and easier it will be to make corrections/alterations. The more you fail the better the end result will turn out. Every failure breaches an opportunity for improvement. Which leads to the other quote from Mike, which was “ try again and again until you succeed.” This isn’t limit to product development, but across life. There’s two type of people the quitters and the go getters.
After Mikes presentation we broke into our teams. We had the task of designing a logo and coming up with a team name. Im apart of team one and we’re focusing on a innovative tread for prosthetic users. We came up with the name Solestice. Yes, we spelled it like the sole of a shoe. Which lead to the design of our logo. Its two triangles stack on top of one another, but they are off centered. After getting the tinker file finished we sent it off to the 3D printed and printed it out.
For week 4 we had another special guest speaker Michael Hansen, a U of I alumnus and industrial designer at EarthSense. EarthSense is a startup that decided to change how data is collected from land. While some companies are utilizing drones to collect from above EarthSense is using a robot to collect data below. Michael worked on numerous prototypes for the newest edition of the robot, TerraSentia. From altering the design of the robot to accommodate for easy access of the battery to redesigning the camera assembly to make it easier to assemble correctly, Michael shared that the prototyping journey was not short of failures. In fact, there are parts of the new robot that Michael wishes he could have changed before the release. Hearing that reminded me of companies like Apple. New products get released every year because there is always something to improve about the last product.
Constantly changing and improving is ultimately what makes a company strong and impactful.
prototypes of the EarthSense robot
The remaining time left of the class was spent designing and printing our logo/team name. This is the first time that we got the chance to be hands-on with the equipment in the maker lab. We utilized TinkerCad to design the logos and after a brief tutorial on Cura, a slicing software, we were able to print out our designs on the 3D printers. The adrenaline that I’ve received from being more hands-on has made me even more excited about what’s in store for the rest of the semester.
Team name – Latin for wheel
After meeting with the team for another week we all decided that we wanted to refine the project to be of a smaller scope. One idea that we generated was focusing on children. Since we are leaning towards designing a product for aesthetic purposes, we decided that a good focus area would be kids. It is important that everyone can feel as if they can represent their individualism, and childhood is a popular time in which people start to explore ways to express themselves. After someone in the team mentioned the sketcher sneakers for kids that light up we got the idea to create something similar. After a little researching, I found out about the Arduino POV display and thought that would be an interesting topic to explore. I believe that there are many analogous inspirations that we can find if we decide to go in this direction. Even though the scope of the project will be smaller it won’t be easier to think of ideas that we can produce. In spite of this, I am excited to see how our project will continue to evolve over the semester.
This week, my team had the opportunity to actually utilize the software TinkerCad in class today. We were given the challenge of creating a logo and team name. With Arielle as our mentor we decided to have a team name with similar vibes to her company, Ingenium, which is a latin translation for the word ability. We named our team EVINCO, which is latin for overcome. We chose to use a lightning bolt and circle to represent the racing a wheel chair and the speed that comes with it.
Moving forward with our team name, we still were unsure what we wanted to pursue as our opportunity. With uncertainty on all of our minds, we reached out to Arielle and Adam and asked if we could return to DRES with the opportunity to observe a practice. Although it required waking up at 8am for practice on a Friday, Maryam, Kate and I learned an immense amount from attending. Once in the facility, Arielle showed us a typical racing wheel and explained the process of changing the tread on the hand ring once it wears out. First, an athlete must remove the current tread, which is attached with concrete paste and made out of the rubber form a wheel. To remove it it is necessary to reheat the concrete until it is sticky then scrape it off. Once it is off, the new tread must be cut, aligned to the handrail, and then pasted onto the rail. This process can take up to four hours, which is an obscene amount of time that student athletes need to spend fixing a critical part of their training routine. The pictures below show a hand ring with new, proper tread and one that has been used for months and needs to be replaced. Arielle said that she was going to wait until two weeks before the marathon before she actually changes her ring because the process is so long. Realizing what a hassle this is and how much of a demand there is for a long-lasting product that easily can be changed, we began brainstorming new ideas to EVINCO this issue
A wheel with fresh tread.
Arielle’s used wheel with a lot of the rubber missing.
With this issue in mind, the ideation process continued with my group discussing different solutions that may solve this tedious problem. The ideas ranged from a cover to put on the tires when it rains, to a snap on for the gloves to increase traction. This is the first time I realized we may have more than one solution to overcome this issue; the question is which one is the most efficient? With uncertainty in what is possible, we will have a better idea of our product once we have the opportunity to experiment with more softwares and materials.
I can’t believe week 4 is already over! As the semester continues to progress, I find myself getting more excited about the course and the opportunities we are finding through exploring. During class this past week, we got a visit from Mike Hansen to talk about the work he is doing with his company. Mike was a former teacher of mine, and one of my favorite teachers I have had in college. Throughout the courses he taught us, he would always remind us to “fail early and fail often.” This message has helped my understanding of design greatly throughout my four years at the university. Failing early and often gives you the chance to explore many iterations and possibilities when designing. That message will continue to be true throughout this course as well, as we will need to try many possibilities to find a solution for our opportunity area.
I was so impressed to see the work that Mike’s company is doing. As well as very happy that he seems to love his work so much. The company is in the early stages of developing robots to help farmers evaluate the needs of their farm from the ground, rather than by drones as most other companies are currently doing. In developing the robots, Mike makes tons of iterations of how it might look and function in order to find one workable solution. It was very inspiring to see first hand how a message I have been taught in school is so applicable in real life.
My teams opportunity statement is “To help athlete’s improve the grip on their ring when racing in undesirable weather conditions.”
We decided to pursue a solution for this opportunity after being inspired by the company created by Arielle for her racing gloves. She told us how during poor weather conditions, racing becomes even more difficult as you no longer have a good grip on the hand rings of the chair. We were lucky to be invited to visit the team practice on Friday morning and get a chance to have a closer look at the chairs, the hand rings, the gloves, and the process that goes into preparing your chair for a race. Wrapping the hand ring is such a difficult and time consuming task, that it would be so great to find a way to streamline that process into something more efficient and easier to do. There is also a lot of potential in the idea of creating a cover for the glove itself during times of harsh weather conditions. I am very excited to explore these ideas more and see what my team and I can come up with in the coming weeks.
In last week’s class, I’m glad that we had Mike Hansen, employee from EarthSense, to come down to the Makerlab and share his experience with us. It’s really inspiring that his company is working on developing robots for agricultural use. I didn’t expect that they put in so much efforts to invent such a lot of different models, and they also need to come up with the best one suitable for their customers. They would also do some customization for different needs from their customers. I find this is a really good idea, because in our group project we also need to consider that the targeted group of people may have different needs and purposes of using our products. This inspired me to explore an idea that can contribute to a more flexible product. Big thank you to Mike for sharing his valuable experience.
Mike was presenting
Later on, we came up with a team name “Blueprint”, and we designed our team’s logo and started printing it. Actually it’s my first time using a 3D-printer. I thought we would do it by hand, but it seems like after we design the logo in the software it would just do it automatically, which is really convenient and efficient.
Making our team’s logo“Blueprint”
Last Friday, our team went to Nugent Hall in order to seek for interviewing the director of Beckwith program. However, we didn’t had his contact information, so we didn’t make an appointment. He was probably off work when we got there. Therefore, we decided to asked for residences who passed by if they’re willing to give us some time to conduct a quick interview. Fortunately, Selina Lee, a Latin major student, decide to helped us. During the interview, we did realize and understand that there are some difficulties that she’s facing everyday. For example, she said it’s really hard for her to hold a drink. This is just one tiny difficulty that she’s dealing with everyday, but it also may be a big problem for lots of people who have the same experience as her. After the interview, we had a better understanding of the need of people who have disabilities. This provided us one possible direction that we can work on.
This Sunday, one of our group member Saloni, reached out to her friend from high school and made an appointment to interview Avi M Samuels. We asked him some similar questions as what we asked Selina, such as future career path, what they do in their spare time, and what the difficulties are in their daily life. He’s really friendly person and he see things comprehensively and meticulously. He provided us lots of valuable perspectives and potential resources that we can reach out to. Overall, we really appreciate his help and thanks him for taking his time doing the interview with us.
Avi and Huan during the interview
We look forward to making more progress in the next week. We’ll probably interview our mentor Ryan next week. Due to his busy schedule, we failed to get the chance meeting with him. Each member in our team will do research on different fields. Hopefully, we can come up with a more specific idea about the product that we’re about to design.
This week we had the opportunity to listen to Mike Hansen who now is a part of the EarthSense startup. Two years ago Mike was my teacher for a class that covered concepts, methods, and applications of computer-aided industrial design to the design of products for mass manufacture. It was great to see where Mike is using his impeccable skills! EarthSense is revolutionary for the agricultural business. They are creating new possibilities in crop breeding, agricultural product development, product testing, crop research, and field scouting by improving the quantity, accuracy, cost, and speed of in-field plant trait data collection and analytics. (https://www.earthsense.co/home)
EarthSense Robot analyzing plot of corn
“Fail early, fail often.”
Similar to the way Mike taught my sophomore year class SolidWorks, he stressed the theory of trial and error. SolidWorks and 3D printing lend themselves to learning from failures since both are relatively young practices. The only true way of learning how to use either platform one must try things they will most likely fail at. Mike’s story about constructing the case for the camera is a great example of failure leading to innovation. Trying something that no one has done before is a risk, however, if risks aren’t being made, progress isn’t being made either.
3D printed logo
3D print of my groups team name Rotam
Once my group sat down to brainstorm our team name, we decided what path we would be moving towards. With 3D printing in mind, we decided to create parts for a wheelchair that will add personality. Focusing on children as our target users, we will be creating inexpensive additions that will excite and personalize aspects of their wheelchair.
We started this session off by learning from Mike Hansen of EarthSense. EarthSense helps farmers leave the tedious task of measuring crops up to robots. His knowledge and story was great to hear because he showed us how design plays out within a company. He also talked about the observations that were made when watching farmers use the robot on site. This allowed them to find out things like they liked to put stuff like papers on the robot. This is a good example of how observing a user can help lead to more discoveries. He also showed us how many different variations of different pieces he has made and that’s a good reminder of the fact that although the end result is really cool and exciting, the process can be long and it is important to trust that it will eventually result in a useful product.
This week we also made a company name and 3D printed the logo. One of the former members of my team dropped the course, so I also met our newest team member Eric. We decided to name ourselves blueprint because we thought it was similar to the drafts of making designs as it is usually used as a paper version of a model for architecture. We sketched many designs to try to make something that encompassed the name, but finally working on the software itself led us to our final design.
Finally we talked about what we will do going forward in terms or research. We agreed we needed to do some more interviews. On Friday my team went to Beckwith Residential Support Services in Nugent to see if we could find anyone to talk to. We had a hard time getting in at first but then discovered we could just call the front desk so we didn’t have to wait for someone to come out or go in.
After getting in we asked the front desk if she had the contact info of anyone we could speak too. She told us to check if anyone was in based on the hallway of offices, but unfortunately since it was past 5 PM no one was there.
We spotted someone coming up and were nervous to approach a stranger and see if they would be willing to be interviewed at first, but after asking she was very willing to be interviewed. Her name was Selina, and she is studying Latin. We spoke about a lot of things like what she does in her free time and what she wants to do for her career. Something that would help her is something that could help her grab stuff.
We decided to also interview someone else this week, so I reached out to a high school classmate, Avi, who lives in Beckwith.
We met with him today, and had a very in-depth conversation about his career goals and his experience. He spoke about having more door openers at public buildings and coming up with a way to preserve historic site while also making them more accessible. I had to leave early, but he gave my teammates some more people to talk to.
Our interview with Avi really made me realize how much opportunity there is in this space. We were able to get a better glimpse into his life and I am looking forward to continue to interview more users to better understand how we can help them multitask.
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.
This is not the first time I heard someone say “it’s okay to fail.” I have always been told that as long as you learn something from the failure, it is okay to fail. But honestly, I would still rather not fail at all. I always thought that phrase was something that is easy to say but hard to put into action. In fact, I don’t like a failure so much that I would rather not try if I knew I was going to fail.
However, as I applied to be part of the course, I knew that I would need to have a different mindset if I were to be a part of it. When designing and creating something, you are bound to fail. I believe that if you don’t fail while creating, you most likely did not take enough risk. There is probably nothing innovative about it. Even with this understanding, I knew I would have difficult time coping with failure.
As if the professor knew this challenge that I was facing, learning from failure was one of the mindsets that we learned when the course began. However, it was the same thing that I heard before – how we should celebrate the lesson learned from the failure. But I wanted to hear more about it. I needed someone to convince me that you can eventually achieve success by learning through failure. This week, the professor invited Michael Hansen from EarthSense to do that exactly.
Michael Hansen from EarthSense talking about the importance of failure and learning from it
Michael shared about his journey through a startup business called EarthSense. The company creates a small autonomous vehicle that the farmers can use to collect data on the traits of the plants in the fields. Currently, they have a working model that can successfully collect the data for the farmers, but in order to create a working model, he had to go through many failures, especially during the design phase of the product. He would design a prototype, test it, learn about what is working and what is not, reiterate the design, and continue the process.
What I found interesting in his presentation is that in a way, he was telling us that there is a “correct time” to fail. This so-called correct time is when the product is in an early prototyping stage. The reason behind this is that the earlier you fail, the smaller the cost of failure is. Thus the reason he was telling us “Fail early, fail often.” I appreciate this mindset as he was saying that it is okay to fail early since the cost is low, but as you reiterate and continue the process, you should fail less and less. To me, that is more convincing than simply saying that it is okay to fail as long as you learn from it. Yes, indeed learning from failure is vital in creating a better design, but at some point, you should stop failing, right?
3D Printing for the First Time!
During the second part of the class, we had an opportunity to get into a team, come up with a name for the team, and design a logo to represent it. Just coming up with a name itself was already challenging for us. As soon as we gathered as a team, everyone, including myself, was claiming how bad they are at coming up with names. To solve this problem, we started throwing out what we were working with throughout the project in order to get inspiration: accessibility, affordability, wheelchair… and then one of the team members got it. ROTAM. It means wheel in Latin, which we thought was perfect since our goal is to improve the wheelchairs somehow. We even came up with a design immediately. We were going to have ROTAM with the O replaced with a wheel of a wheelchair. Unfortunately, due to the time constraint, we could not transfer that exact design into a 3D printed model.
Ultimaker 2 at work 3D printing the team logo
3D printed model of the team logo
It was very exciting for me to see that the 3D printing worked. The whole process felt more realistic now that I had an experience going through the designing, transferring the design into software design, and 3D printing the design to have a tangible model by the end. Although it will be way more challenging to do this for a wheelchair part that can actually be used, I am excited to see the potential that it holds.
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.
You must be logged in to post a comment.