Tag: illini service dogs

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Week 5 Recap – Inspiration, Innovation, and Implementation

Week 5 was an information overload as we heard from 4 speakers about potential partnerships, campus resources, innovation in the 3D printing space, and the human-centered design process.

New Opportunities

Our first speaker was Sneha Subramanian from Illini Service Dogs. She gave a great presentation about the needs that her organization faces for cheap and innovative solutions to problems that their dogs face every day. A few ideas she mentioned were redesigning collars and leashes, easily attachable and detachable leashes to wheelchairs, and easier ways for dogs to open cabinet doors. While no group ended up taking Illini Service Dogs on as their mentor this semester, the presentation was still very informative and I hope that future classes choose to tackle these problems!

3D Printing Innovation

Our next speaker was John Hornick, author of 3D Printing Will Rock the World, and an acclaimed speaker on innovation in the 3D printing space. John’s presentation focused on the innovation, customization, and democratization of 3D printing and its impact on the world. He talked about how the democratization of 3D printing has been a catalyst for customization and innovation within the space. One notable example he gave was of a 5-year-old named Cameron Haight who was born without an arm. Cameron has customized his prosthetic with custom 3D printed attachments as a way of expressing himself. He has even 3D printed prosthetics for other kids like him. Here 3D printing has been used as a way for little kids to be proud of their prosthetics and what makes them unique. John also went on to talk more about the future of the industry. He mentioned how 3D printing in healthcare is moving towards substitutes which attempt to improve functionality, instead of replacements which simply mimic it. One interesting example he gave was of a molecular self-assembly project conducted by the University of London that is using 3D printing and human cells to create bio-mechanical structures. Overall, John’s talk was very informative and we were very lucky to him present to our class.

Exploring Resources

Jeff Ginger was our third speaker of the day and he told us about his job as director of the Fab Lab at the University of Illinois. The Fab Lab is a maker space on campus that houses many different tools that students and community member can use to build things. Our CU Fab Lab is part of a larger global network of Fab Labs that share best practices and aim to democratize making to everyone. The students in our class have varying experience levels with the Fab Lab so it was helpful to learn about the full range of services they offer. One thing that stuck out to me about Jeff’s talk was the concept of DIWO, or Do It With Others. This concept perfectly embodies our class and our approach to making. Through Yellowdig, blog posts, and class presentations we are encouraged to all work together to share ideas and best practices. This process helps keeps us accountable to the true needs of our mentors and ensures that we come up with the best possible solution. Before this class, I thought that design was a very individual process, but now I see that design takes a lot of people in order to succeed.

Human Centered Design Process

The final speaker of the day was our TA Mehmet Aydin. His presentation focused on the principles of Human Centered Design and how we can apply the process to our own projects. One of his main points was about the process of diverging and converging ideas in multiple iterations to get to the best possible outcome. The diverging process involves creating choices, while the subsequent converging process forces you to pick from that pool of choices. He also brought up a unique example of how simple solutions can be the most effective. Mehmet shared the story of how little kids were scared of using MRI machines and were having trouble laying still throughout the whole process. Instead of redesigning the whole MRI machine, doctors made the experience fun for kids by decorating the machine as a pirate ship or space ship and pretending that the kids had to stay still as part of a game. This made the experience fun for the kids and yielded more accurate scan results.

Mehmet’s presentation on Human Centered Design

Trying It Out

After Mehmet’s presentation, our class split up into our teams to try the Human Centered Design process for ourselves. We started by recounting the interviews our teams had conducted over the past few weeks and identifying the issues, motivators, and barriers surrounding our need and need groups. After using the “diverge” stage to come up with as many ideas as possible, our next task was to group our findings into segments. This part of the process helped us organize our thoughts and see broad trends across our needs. This exercise was a valuable learning process for all of the teams and it helped us identify main needs and areas where we still needed to conduct interviews to receive more information.

  • Team Evinco
  • Team 3D Bal
  • Team Solestice
  • Team Movi

Thank you to all of the presenters who took the time to share their experiences with our class!

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Week 5

This week we were introduced to four guest speakers: Sneha Subramanian from the Illini service dogs, John Hornick author of “ 3D Printing Will Rock the World”, Jeff Ginger from the CU Community Fab lab, and the Illinois Informatics Institute. We began with a brainstorming session with the Illini Service Dogs. We specially were looking at areas of opportunity with improving disabled users independence with service dogs. Ideas bounced around and some really interesting things came from this. After the brainstorming session John Hornick brought so much of the 3D printing industry to our attention. There are so many trends out there, but John emphasised 3 main trends. One of which is that 3D printing spurs innovation, it also increases democratization. Lastly 3D printing is full customizable. I personally really enjoyed all the different innovative projects globally that John mentioned to us.

Jeff from CU community Fab lab gave a very energetic and passionate overview of the lab itself. He told us of all the resources and network we have here on campus. He then went into showing some of his personal projects, all produced at the CU Fablab. He designed this really cool solar power laptop case that charged his laptop. He also created this octopus dongle sort of thing that has every plug in port you could think of. Jeff seems to really be passionate about innovation and I though his overall presentation was inspirational.

After the guest presentation we were given on from our TA Mehmet Aydin on Design Thinking. During his presentation he introduced us to the Design Thinking Modules. You have Inspiration- Ideation- Implementation model. You then have Empathy- Define ( we focus on defining the opportunity from an empathetic standpoint. Then you have Prototype- Test phase. Mehmet also mentioned the idea of diverging, converging and repeating the entire process. You have to just do it. It kind of ties back to last weak guest Mike Henson statement of, “ Fail early, fail often.” The design process is a process of decision making and doing things. You have to ideated on an idea and act on it. Fail and fail and through each failure new innovation ill emerge.

Once Mehmet’s presentation  we broke off into our teams to do a “Stories & Experience” exercise. The task of the exercise was for us to look at our interview Q/A and diverge deeper insight from them.We were able to really figure out our users frustrations, emotions, limitations, pretty much the good and bad. Solicestice in particular, was able implement the experiences of the user to create more value with our potential product. It gave us a framework to further structure of customer discovery and validation of the idea itself.



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Two Roads Diverged, And I Made Peace With The Idea Of Not Trying Both

INFO-MANIA.

This week, we had four presentations: one from a Sneha Subramanian of Illini Service Dogs, John Hornick (author of 3D Printing Will Rock the World), one from Jeff Ginger of the CU Community Fab Lab and the Illinois Informatics Institute, and one from our TA Mehmet Aydin. In line with our focus on human centered design, Illini Service Dogs (ISD) had some ideas, specifically about improving disabled people’s ability to independently work with service dogs, that they were hoping to collaborate with us on. John Hornick gave us incredible insight on the meta-trends within the 3D printing industry. The three main trends that John has observed to be true of the 3D printing industry are: 1.) 3D printing spurs innovation 2.) 3D printing increases democratization and 3.) 3D printing is all about customization. John informed us on the many different groundbreaking 3D printing projects going on all around the world in pretty much every field you could think of, and it was really inspirational to hear about all these success stories and incredible innovation. I was especially intrigued by his mentioning of research in bioprinting replacement organs, an idea that I had actually looked into six years ago for a high school biology assignment. Listening to John’s presentation reminded me of all the different angles we would need to look into for our project but also reminded me of the endless possibilities – opportunities – that we have when working with 3D printing.

One of our four presentations: Mehmet teaching us about how to go about thinking while we create our product.

The next presentation was from Jeff Ginger, whose high energy and excited gestures were refreshing after absorbing so much information in such a short amount of time. Jeff let us know about the network of Fab Labs as well as the amazing resources we have available to us at the CU Community one. It was kind of shocking to realize that there were so many resources available to us as UIUC students that I did not previously know about! Jeff was really passionate about his work, and he had a way of talking that makes you want to quit whatever you’re doing and pursue fab lab creations full-time immediately, just from listening to him.  The passion that we saw from him for his projects is definitely something that I will remember and make sure that I also feel in any future projects that I work on. I want to be able to be someone who can inspire others to take a chance based purely on the energy from my own passions – just as Jeff did for me.

CONVERGING ON FEAR.

When Mehmet gave us his presentation, he taught us about design thinking. he mentioned the idea of diverging and converging, and then repeating the process. Through this, I learned that I personally find the converging process difficult. I love coming up with new ideas and the many different possible ways we can implement an opportunity, but my indecisiveness and lack of confidence in my own creative abilities tends to show when I have to make a decision on which one to proceed with. In other words, I often let the fear of failure and ‘doing something incorrectly’ get in the way of my decision-making process. This was something that I have always known about myself in the back of my mind, but never before have I had to confront it head on like this. It made me grateful for the insight of my other group members, the mentors of this class, and the course itself for giving me an opportunity to grow not just in knowledge but as a person. This is not a problem that will be solved by one presentation, but finally being able to acknowledge the problem is a start.

  • Solestice’s brainstorming session result.
  • Stories & Experience framework that we worked off of.

Besides personal growth, Solestice was able to analyze all the information we had gathered so far. Through the Stories & Experiences framework we were given, we were able to break down the emotions and the facts of our project. Being able to visualize information like this was really helpful in showing us which direction to take our tread attachment idea. We will definitely be using this method to organize all future thoughts on new information we acquire in the future, especially since we have just set up an interview with a teammate’s professor who makes shoes in his free time. Overall, this week was a week of confrontation and growth, of diverging from expectations and converging on a direction to take our project.