On Tuesday, we had a meeting with all the students who will attend Make-A-Thon. Some of them are from the art class and a few people are from a class in Fablab. Lots of them are actually art and design major students. I didn’t expect there would be other students from another college attending the Make-A-Thon. I think it would be really interesting by having such a diverse participant. Definitely, this will make sure that the products we’ll make in the Make-A-Thon will be more creative and effective.
After the meeting, we get the chance talking to some guest speakers and mentors. Saloni and I interviewed one of the guest speaker who’s also a wheelchair user. We asked about his situation and we found that our ideas of gloves don’t really help him that much since he can hold certain things and use them effectively. Later on, we found a challenge that it’s hard for him to cut the meat into pieces. He is using a special knife which cost lots of energy to be utilized. It might be a great opportunity for us to think about if there’s any specific problems like this waiting there to be solved. We might gain more insights and ideas by focusing on those specific challenge. He also talked about his socks with special loop which can help him put it on his feet. I found this is a really innovative idea.
We also meet another student from the class in Fablab, and we introduced our product to him. I can tell he’s really good at critical thinking and he really came up with lots of ideas that suggest us that we might also can think about other opportunities but not just focus on our current idea. Through the conversation with the guest speaker and the student, we also discovered a new challenge which is it’s really difficult for the guest speaker to put on a watch by himself. The student mentioned magnetic watch, however the guest speaker said sometimes it might stick to the wheels when he rolls the wheels of his wheelchair. This provide us a whole new idea to explore.
At last, we asked the student to join our team and provide more advice to our project. I really look forward to collaborate with him in next few weeks. He also knows more technical skills using the equipments in the Fablab, and I believed that this will expand our ideas with barriers of the difficulties in operating different machines. I hope we can come up with a more comprehensive idea of our project and start working on it.
Hi Eric,
As a pre-event for the Make-a-thon, I expected that there would be a diverse group of the participants, but what I didn’t expect was that the pre-event is introducing more mentors and expert users because the other group of participants has not entered the inspiration stage yet. Something that I found useful from this pre-event is also that we got more perspectives and more potential users/mentors to get inspiration from for our product ideas.