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.
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.
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.
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.
This week, we were back at the Maker Lab solidifying our inspirations and ideas. We were able to confront a collective fear together: failure. Many of us had expressed fear of failure, and while I had not done so publicly, it was a thought that has always been floating around in the back of mind too. We had the incredible opportunity to talk to an UIUC alumnus, Mike Hansen, from EarthSense, a startup dedicated to using autonomy, software, and innovation to revolution agriculture data collection. Mike came in prepared with stories of failure after failure to share with us, and he showed us how failures stacked up into successes and solutions. He showed us how failures can be unintentional successes with the way that the camera guard he made only allowed the camera to be installed a single way, which later became a needed feature when considering different assemblers of the TerraSentia he designed. It was one thing to be told to “try again and again until you succeed,” but hearing Mike’s actual experiences helped make it click for me. I realized that it really was okay – and actually expected! – to have failures in the process of innovation.
Mike Hansen telling us about failures and different innovation mindsets.
TINKERING AROUND.
After,
Mike’s talk, we split off into our groups to discuss a team name, the direction
our product will go in, and a team logo. My team, previously Team 1, had a very
difficult time coming up with a name, and cycled through various varieties of
OnTread, Solestetic, other obscure words, etc. Yet, eventually, taking
inspiration from a previously vetoed name, we settled on the name Solestice. Solestice
is a portmanteau of the words ‘sole,’ referring to the bottom of a shoe, and ‘solstice,’
an astronomical phenomenon that occurs twice a year. Our hope for this project
is to create an attachable tread for prosthetics users to use when walking on
ice and other similarly slippery terrain. Afterwards, we created a logo which
resembles two triangles stacked upon each other, slightly misaligned and familiarized
ourselves with the Tinkercad program through modeling said logo and 3D printing
it on one of the machines present in the Maker Lab.
MOVING.
As we wrapped up our team name, we discussed a plan to meet with our mentor Jenna, a prosthetic user, once again to make sure that the direction we take our product in is user-centered and truly something prosthetic users can and want to use. We will definitely take the new mindsets we have learned throughout each class – that of user-centered design and not viewing failure as a taboo – and apply it to our own research and development process!
Salutations! I’m a sophomore studying accountancy who likes to create some art on the side (yes, I’m one of those photographer/poet/all around artist people). My passion is in advocating for equity, and I probably spend a little too much time on Hulu.
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