Tag: DRES

Posted on

Creation Station: Week 7

This week was jam-packed as our team visited the Fab Lab, brainstormed potential prototypes, 3D printed our fusion models, met with Jeannette Elliot, and created our first low-fidelity prototypes.

Introduction to the Fab Lab

Our class this week took place in the Fab Lab on campus. The Fab Lab is a maker space that houses designers, makers, and innovators from the campus and the local community. I was blown away by the amount of creativity on display at the Fab Lab. People had let their imagination run wild and were creating anything that came into their head. One of my favorite inventions, was a keyboard made out of wood and copper tape. I was struck by the simplicity and cost-efficiency of the product when compared to typical keyboards. In the Fab Lab, we were split into two groups to learn a little bit more about the various resources. My group worked with arduinos to create a circuit that could turn a lightbulb on and off based on its horizontal or vertical orientation.

  • Example of items lying around the Fab Lab
  • Exterior view of keyboard
  • Interior view of keyboard
  • Inside wall in the Fab Lab

Diverging on Ideas

During the second half of class we split up into our teams to brainstorm potential solutions for the needs we had identified. We were given 4 different prompts to challenge us to think creatively about the problem. At first, I was worried that our group would run out of ideas after the first prompt because I thought there were only a few ways to solve our problem. However, being forced to think about designing our problem for little kids and the elderly forced us to think outside the box and explore new possibilities.

Our design ideas from the brainstorming activity

If at First You Don’t Succeed, Try, Try Again

After class, I went to the Makerlab to pick up the 3D print of the phone holder I had designed on Fusion 360 during the last class. However, when I got there I was dismayed to see there had been a failure and the top of my phone holder had failed to print. When I talked to the lab assistant about what happened they told me that sometimes prints fail and that I should just try again. Luckily, my phone holder and the box and lid I created were a success the second time through. This taught me a valuable lesson that while 3D printing is very cool it is still an emerging technology and it is not perfect all the time.

  • Failed phone holder print
  • Successful phone holder print
  • Box and lid print

Stakeholder Meeting

Later in the week, my team had a chance to meet with Jeannette Elliot. Jeannette is a physical therapist at DRES and a prosthetic leg user. Our interview with her was very informative and we learned about the struggles she has had in the past with prosthetic leg protective covers. The main takeaways from our conversation were the importance of maintaining flexibility with the cover, keeping the cost affordable, and offering customization options to appeal to the different aesthetic preferences of users. Our team is very thankful that Jeannette took the time to share her insights with us!

Design Time

The week ended with our team making our first low-fidelity prototypes. The 3 designs we chose to prototype were a knee pad attached by velcro, a flexible knee pad attached by a hook and ring strap, and a fabric sleeve with a knee pad encased inside. Our next steps will be to show these designs to Jenna and get her initial feedback.

  • Hook/Ring Strap Prototype
  • Fabric Sleeve Prototype
  • Velcro Knee Pad Prototype
Posted on

Diverge, Converge, Repeat

Class today was quite speaker heavy. Amongst everyone who presented a PowerPoint of sorts, we had 4 different speakers… lots of information to take in, however a few ideas really stood out to me. Initially, I would love to start off with the idea of diverging and then converging. I like to think of this as ideation then analysis. Our readings labeled this process synthesis. We capture our learnings, discover the significance of them, and ultimately create actionable takeaways to move forward with.

One of our TAs presented this concept right before our group activity. It is crucial to let ideas out, having them free-flow and generate one after another. Nonetheless, it is then necessary to analyze these ideas and converge your choices to be able to make a focused decision. Overall, today’s session was an epitome of that. The 4 speakers presented countless ideas and insights, which we then had to prioritize and analyze within the scopes of our projects within the DRES community.  

Accordingly, the two ideas which I converged on by the end of class were customization and accessibility, which yes does seem like the recurring theme for me and my group. John Hornick initially mentioned customization as one of the pillars of 3D printing. Customization allows for individuality and personality to be expressed through utilitarian design, which is an extremely rare combination. Until now, wheelchairs have been viewed as a means to an end, with limited ability for the user to inject his or her own ideation into it.

3D printing encourages individuals to take matters into their own hands and solve problems with an initiative – their own initiative. This individual empowerment is what the final speaker, Jeff Ginger from FabLab honed in on. We were shown the plethora of the design spaces available, however merely 7 were available to the general student population. The rest required some sort of special access. He dubbed this rather useless and inefficient, and frankly I agree. What good are resources if they are not accessible?

Our team looked at this within the scope of wheelchair accessories and creating something which the target community that they will actually want. We want to make it accessible through not only price point, but also desire. This will require analyzing consumer product trends and created marketing campaigns to increase the product awareness once we launch. Design is insignificant if there is not a user desire.  

Posted on

Week 2 Reflection

Visiting DRES was a very cool experience. As a former student of Dr. McDonagh’s Disability + Relevant Design course, I have heard a lot about DRES, as well as Coach Adam’s space. It was exciting to be able to visualize the space I had heard so much about. But an even more exciting experience was being able to meet the athletes and students that we had discussed often in that class as well.

I have always been inspired by Arielle’s success, as she was the person who first had success in this pipeline of courses. To see someone, and not necessarily even a designer, create a product and then profit from its creation is just so exciting for me to see. She really found an area that needed improvement, no matter the scale, and took off with it. I would love to talk to her further about how she runs her company now and how it’s affected her day to day life.

Hearing Ron speak was also another enlightening experience. I feel like we were so fortunate to have him come in to speak because he was an excellent story teller that really captivated the room. Ron seems to be a person that allows for nothing to stop him, and if something gets in his way, he finds a way to fix it. I was so impressed by his solutions he created, as well as the fact that he continues to find creative solutions to the challenges that come up in his daily life.

At this point I have a few inspirations for projects that might be good opportunities to tackle. I’m looking forward to meeting with my team to hear their ideas as well.


Posted on

Inspired at DRES

The Building

I have never been to DRES before, so it was great to have the opportunity to visit. Seeing the training facilities and all the different chairs downstairs gave me a small glimpse into the life of a wheel chair athlete, and how it has changed over the years with all the iterations of the wheelchairs. It was cool to see how the athletes were working out on their machines, and I wonder if these athletes train in the ARC/CRCE as well or have everything they need to use in this facility.

The People

It was great to be able to sit down and hear each of the experts stories, because they were all so unique and different. Here are a few things I got from each of the experts:

A quote that I got out of this meeting that I believe Ron said was:

How do you use what you have to make something better?

I think this in away makes the idea of designing something a lot less intimating because it is a humbling reminder that we don’t need to create anything new. We already have so many resources, we just need to be creative in thinking about what else their usability could be. The added benefit to using what already exists in the world comes means there is a greater chance of low cost and accessibility since no new technology is required.

I thought it was really eye opening to hear about Ryan’s experience playing in the parade and the different adjustments that needed to be made to make that happen. Playing an instrument while in a wheelchair during a parade is something I have never thought of before.

After hearing all the stories and learning more about the experts I am most interested in working with either Jenna or Ryan on their student experience. Since I feel I can relate to them on the struggles of being a student, I am curious to learn more about what can add joy/value to their student life. I was a little nervous to ask any questions because I didn’t want to ask anything off putting or sound offensive or knowledgeable. It is a little intimidating to ask questions in a group setting especially because I wasn’t 100% sure on what was appropriate to ask. Going forward I hope to share ideas with my group and build the confidence to ask the experts more about their life.

Posted on

Finding Creative Confidence and Inspiration

Finding Creative Confidence

One of my biggest concerns of taking the Digital Making Course is my ability to be creative. There is so much fuss around the world about needing to be innovative; about how we should be changing the world. However, I never truly believed that I have the ability to leave such an impact through a creative idea. This lack of confidence caused me to feel nervous about the course. Yes, I wanted to learn about the overall process of designing a product. Yes, I wanted to learn how to use computer-aided design (CAD) software. Yes, I wanted to learn how to use a 3D printer and successfully be able to print an object. But I wanted to do more. With the help of the mentors, the professor, and the fellow students, I wanted to design a product that will bring a positive impact on someone else’s life. Yet, how am I supposed to do that when I do not even believe in my ability to do so?

Thankfully, the course began with learning about different mindsets necessary to be a successful designer, one of which was “Creative Confidence.” The concept of this mindset is that a designer needs to believe in oneself’s ability to have big ideas and act on them. Throughout the journey of designing, there will be many ambiguity and failure, but that doesn’t mean I should give up. I just need to continue to explore different ideas and learn from the failures. It may be easier said than done, but learning about such mindsets allowed me to be less nervous and be more excited about the journey.

Finding Inspiration

With my upgraded mindsets, I was eager to meet the mentors and learn about their stories. I was ready to be inspired. The meeting began with Adam, who showed the class around the Disability Resources & Educational Services (DRES) facility.

At DRES facility, you can find a wall of Paralympians who have competed in wheelchair racing.

It was amazing to see the training equipment that is used, a timeline of racing wheelchairs showing the evolution hanging from the ceiling, and a workshop where innovative ideas to help the athletes come to a reality. Along the tour, we were introduced to Ariel, who shared her story of 3D printing the wheelchair racing gloves and distributing them around the world at a more affordable price for the customers. Afterward, we were introduced to Ryan, Jenna, and Ron, who openly shared about their experiences with wheelchairs, prosthetic legs, and meeting others with similar experiences.

Even before meeting them, I knew that I would gain inspiration from them. But they surpassed my expectations. I wasn’t aware how much of an inspiration they would provide. I felt that every single experience that they shared were valuable, leaving me frantically taking notes throughout the whole session. One of the most important points that were brought up during the conversation was the problem of affordability. It is mostly not the technology or the idea that is lacking in today’s word, but it is more so that these innovative products are not really affordable right now to the majority of the people who they are created for.

From the conversation, I was able to immediately come up with several ideas that I would like to explore down the road. Not only did it raise my eagerness to dive into the project, but it also raised my confidence. Unlike my worry before, I was already developing multiple ideas, demonstrating that I am more creative than I think.

The conversation also changed my perspective about innovation. It’s not about changing the world. Rather, it’s about improving someone else’s world. Even if it makes a difference in a few people’s lives, that is completely fine. As long as you design for the people and create an idea or a product for them to improve an aspect of their lives, you are an innovator. After all, isn’t that what human-centered design is all about?

Posted on

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.

Posted on

If It’s Not Broke, Use It To Create Something New

Walking the same path I’ve anxiously trudged many a time before, I felt a little bit disappointed. I had signed up for this digital making course to learn new things and find ways to stay curious in my field. Yet, everything we had done so far was so familiar to me: the slight sweat building up from the far walk to the DRES testing center, the awkward stillness of its lobby, and quickly redirected glances to avoid eye contact with the strangers you’ve been thrown together with in the class; all of this was familiar. What was unfamiliar was our descent from the first floor to the wheelchair sports training room and the brief retelling of the history of wheelchair sports told to us by our mentor, Adam. What was unfamiliar was learning about how someone who had taken the same class as us mere years ago now had a multinational company whose product had made a significant impact on sports technology. It was incredible learning each individual mentor’s story and the way they made the most out of what they had, using existing technology in unique ways to not just make a profit, but make an impact. Hearing about Jenna and Ron’s struggle to become an athlete, I couldn’t help but relate to the yearning they experienced, having had to stop my own sport, track, due to chronic shin splints.

An idea for using track spikes and rubber soles to create a lighter shoe with traction came from Jenna’s trouble with the black ice on campus.

This is all to say that the whole experience of interviewing experts with experience in disability related products was an especially empathetic and inspiring experience for me. Throughout the course of the interviews, their emphasis on affordability and accessibility inspired many ideas in me to help solve not only problems they brought up about physical disabilities but also problems that my friends and I – who have mental disabilities – experience daily. Given the stigma against such disabilities, the budget constraints of helpful projects tend to be lacking; what really sparked my brain in the interview was all the ways that the experts we talked to innovated creatively through utilizing existing objects and ideas to create solutions to completely unrelated problems. As a business major interested in consulting, this emphasis in cost effective innovative solutions is a particularly interesting mentality that I will carry with me into future problem-solving situations. I had been thinking of innovation in terms of creating new things completely from scratch, but moving forward, I will be keeping the ideal of adapting old inventions to newer and more modern, salient products.