Equal Accessibility – Spring 2019 -Digital Making @ the Illinois Makerlab

February 17, 2019

Week 5 Reflection – Revolutionize the World

This week’s class is full of talks and activities. I personally learned a lot form the second and the third talks.

The second speech is on how 3D printing influences the healthcare industry for people with special needs. Previously, I knew 3D printing was starting to play a huge role in the industry, but I didn’t realize it has already revolutionized people’s lifes to this extent. The speaker, John Hornick, shared some key elements on the influence: innovation, democratization, customization, any part/anywhere/any time, bio-printed replacements, and biomechanical products. Among them, democratization is something that I didn’t expect. I have learned how 3D printed products can be customized to each individual and can be produced anywhere. This makes the production of personalized products on various scales possible. What I didn’t consider is that due to this feature, the technology enables everyone to access and create objects. I regard this as a crucial factor because this allows more people to design and make what they have in minds into reality. By making more people access to innovation, we can see more creativity emerge in different industries that meet more personalized wants and needs. In the future, it may be possible that everyone can bring their ideas into reality, and everyone can benefit from creativity easily because the products can be carried out in all area of the world.

This echoes with the third speech we have from Jeff Ginger of the CU Community Fab Lab. During the talk, we learned what Fab Lab offers to the public. The speech reminds me of the WeWork that I have been to in Shanghai, China and Israel, and I believe this kind of business model can significantly change how people work and enable more people to realize their ideas. In the WeWork in Israel, it has an innovation lab. People at WeWork can get access to all those expensive machines by paying a fee. This encourages entrepreneurship and makes startups to be able to survive at the initial stage since they can scale according to the demand instead of buying all the equipment they need. This is what Fab Lab offers as well. People just need to pay a material fee, and they can access all those expensive equipment. More importantly, the lab is open to anyone in the community. According to Jeff, the Fab Lab is accessible to anyone who has the interest; even homeless people can come to the lab, which is not very common in other labs. Equal accessibility and affordability enable the community around the Fab Lab to learn and express their creativity. As Fab Lab expands its footprint on a global scale, it brings democratization and customization to all over the world.

Huan Wu

I am Huan Wu, a leadership-oriented undergraduate student studying Accountancy, Supply Chain Management and Information Systems/Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I chose to major in those areas because I am a person who likes to learn new knowledge continuously and take on challenges. The challenges bring me excitement, as I enjoy the feeling of using my expertise to tackle hard issues, find insights and initiate change. I believe having an understanding of different fields allows me to have a broader perspective when I look at issues in business. I aim at improving myself and learning skills to initiate change and make real impacts in the world in the future.

My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huan-wu-0507/

February 13, 2019

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.

Michal Cymbalisty

February 10, 2019

Week 4 – Learning from Observations and Reflections

This week, we learned from expert Mike from a startup named EarthSense, strengthened the connection in our team and started to conduct research and gather information. I have gained many meaning insights and am planning to investigate some areas to further my understanding.

In the class, we first had a session with Mike from EarthSense. I have always known the importance of applying users’ feedbacks into adjusting the design, yet it was different to see a rich example and hear the story behind it. Adjusting one area would affect the previous setting in other areas. Therefore, a perspective of system thinking would be very critical. When the designer knows all the possible impacts, the design can consider all factors and is configured in a way that meets all the requirement. As a business student who has some new product development experience, I kept wondering how to make the products to be successful and have more adopters if I were a part of the team. I recognized some crucial points were to understand the problem it was solving, the pinpoint about people’s adoption behavior and the need to design the introductory marketing, pricing, and packaging plan in a way that could lead the product to cross the tipping point. Hearing the design side of the product, I realized understanding the design side of the product gave me more ideas to brainstorm.

After the talk from Mike, we came up with our team name and designed the logo. Since our focus is design, Saloni saw an opportunity by checking synonyms of “design,” and we decided on Blueprint to be our team name. Then, the designing logo part was the hardest part. We brainstormed about possible configurations and implications associated with the word. As I drew possible designs, I came across the idea to combine B and P together since they both have a round part. However, when I pulled it on paper, it didn’t look good. At that time, my group member encouraged me to configure the design on the software to see the effect. After I did that, I found it actually looked better than what I expected. Learning from the failure in the scratch, I intentionally enlarged the side of P so that the letter P could be differentiated from the letter B. We all loved it and it became our logo. I asked a couple of my friends to guess the meaning of the logo after class, the fact that they got the implication right confirmed me that my design worked. This made me aware that it worth a try to further test the idea and follow the instinct. Next time, I should stick to the idea a little bit longer before I give up too quickly.

Scratch

Our Team Logo

After class, our team began our research by interviewing people who have more experiences than us. One key idea that I learned was the significance of equal accessibility. Previously, I was immersed with the concepts of accessibility and affordability, and now the idea of “equal” just made me contemplate more. The meaning of equality is not to provide the same resources to everyone. Rather, it is to provide resources to people in a way that everyone would be on the same level after the assistance. This would mean that we would need to give more opportunities to some people who started at a lower level. Knowing the difference in resources that people begin with can lead to a better design that will enable everyone to be on the same level.

Huan Wu

My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huan-wu-0507/