Tag: #Make-a-thon

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Semester full of Digital Making !

Wow the semester has flew by. I remember taking my disability design course and being heavily encouraged to take this course from my professor Dr Deana McDonagh. I heard countless success stories and instantly got interested. I remember the entire process  of sending a resume and asking access from the instructor. It made the course feel even more official and selective. I wanted to take the course because it could present even more fabrication resources and help me in product development in my startup.

Expectations…

Initially I didn’t necessarily know what to expect. From the course description I thought maybe the the class would be very hands on and explore various methods of fabrication. Even with these little to no expectations the course don’t over promise anything. The course itself wasn’t perfect but it was an overall great experience. It challenged us to think outside the box and look at what we usually consider problems as areas of opportunity for innovation. The structure of the course prompted us to use the parameters set and essentially work through things, which allowed us to learn even more. This style of teaching could go one of two ways. The class could be way to lose, which causes confusion and lack of understanding of expectations. Or it could be how this course went and really give students the opportunity to explore, fail, plan, and execute on an idea.

This course further enhanced some fabrication skills I already have and taught me some fairly new ones as well. As an industrial designer I’m constantly doing project and solving problems. Design thinking, user centered design, empathic design are all things this course subtly hinted in throughout the semester. The workshops enabled us to gain new skills and learn processes. Many of, if not all the guest speakers, provided meaningful insight throughout the semester as well. There are so many takeaways from this class.

Solestice

I was partnered with two bright young women from the college of business. I couldn’t have asked for a better team. We had a great dynamic and right away knew what we wanted to do for the remainder of the semester project.Through the many conducted interviews and mentors stories we gravitated towards Jenna. She shared with us the story of a time where she slipped on ice immediately after exiting her car. This happened all because she can’t wear boots due to the heavy nature of them. This prevents users like Jenna  and other prosthetic users from wearing them as their residual limbs are not strong enough to carry the amount of weight the boot has. This is where Solstice was birthed. We aimed to figure out a way for Jenna to increase traction without adding adding additional weight to her shoes. Our main goal was To create an attachable, lightweight shoe tread that can be used to travel in a variety of terrains.

Low Fidelity Prototype

My group and I brainstormed countless times trying to figure out how to make this idea into a real thing. We’d sketch  ideas and somehow came up with the thought of incorporating spikes ( like in track shoes) it would help with traction. Unfortunately after creating a low fidelity we realized that our user may be required to take said device off when walking indoors. We also wanted to make it as easy to use as possible, while providing a comfortable fit we thought to use velcro. This set us up perfectly to further ideate on this idea and create our very own functioning prototype at the makeathon.

At the Make-a-thon itself team Solstice focused on three main components of creating this product:  Arduino, molding, and attaching. The arduino portion was super cool and challenging. It was my first time coding and working with circuitry. Essentially this would add a unique tech factor to our tread that would allow users to have a sense of force feedback. From research we found prosthetic users have issues shifting weight which can lead to gaits abnormalities. This small pressure sensor would give them that data and in term help prevent this from happening. The design itself was fairly simple. We coded an Arduino Uno to illuminate LED lights that indicated pressure being applied. To create the pressure sensor, we sandwiched a piece of foam with two pieces of copper. Ideally, we wanted for there to be three lights, each indicating where the user is putting pressure on the tread. This would enable the user to ensure they are putting enough weight on their prosthetic to maximize stability.

In terms of creating the tread it we wanted to use a molding compound. This would allow for a lightweight thread, but ensure a grip tread form that resembles that of your regular high traction shoe. We created a mold of a shoe outsole. During this process, we coated the shoe in baby powder and mixed the molding compound to a viscosity similar to pancake mix. We held the shoe down until the mold dried. Following, we used a hot glue gun to fill in the mold with thermoplastic material. After the mold was completely filled, we used a heat gun to smooth the top of the sole, making sure the edges were slightly taller than the inside of the sole. The thermoplastic material we used was similar to silicone and, per our research, is a material that creates enough friction to prevent falling on ice.

For the sake of time and resources we opted to utilize velcro for our attaching method. It wasn’t the worst choice but also wasn’t the best as it came with its own constraints.

Overall I really did enjoy this course. From the challenging nature of it to its looseness it was a great experience. I got to learn new and exciting skills. I got to meet some amazing people. Most of all I got to make something with newly found campus wide resources. I’ve really grown as a individual because of this course. I find myself a better teammate. The collaborative portion of this course really ties teams together and promotes all hands. Hopefully you’ll see a team Solstice sole on the market. We really did nurture this product and can’t wait to see it reach its full potential. Never stop making!


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Week 11!

This week was the final stretch before the week of the Make-a-thon. Class began with Professor Vishal clearing up everything regarding the Make-a-thon. The expectation and resources available during this event were explained. Once Vishal finished up we were given a presentation from social innovation representative Valerie. Valerie introduced to the class an opportunity to continue furthering their innovative ventures, while receiving non dilutive funding. This opportunity is provided by a program called the iVenture Accelerator. Which is a startup incubator. It’s a 10 week summer commitment and a full academic year seminar course. Participants receive $10,000 of funding and stipends throughout the summer. They not only provide this funding but have a pool of resources ranging from experts to additional funding opportunities. I am actually apart of the iVenture Accelerator. They really dive deep and help further your idea. They’ve introduced us to so many useful/helpful people. It’s really like a family. They bring you along and you become apart of this amazing ecosystem.

After Valerie’s presentation we met with Milestone Labs to give them an update of our progress to date. My team and I are team Solstice (team 1) so we went first. The folks at Milestone gave some good feedback and advice. They were delighted with our interviews and direction we’re going in. One thing we didn’t do was provide as much of our product as possible. We still have to do more sketches and ideation around a few key details regarding our product. From this meeting my team and I reconviented to brainstorm, reflect, and conduct a list of materials we need for the actual Make-a-thon. As a team we found this material called hydrophilic rubber, which is usually used in winter tires. We have a meeting with a material science professor to give us even more insight on materials and such. Also I have a professor who is a shoe cobbler on hi own time and he pointed us to a few materials as well. None the less we’re super excited for this event and our more refined product prototype!

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Week 10 Summary: Make-a-thon Pre-Event

The ultimate goal of the Digital Making Seminar course is to create a functioning prototype of whatever it is that each team is working on by the end of the Make-a-thon, taking place from Friday, April 12th, 5:00 pm to Sunday, April 14th, 2:00 pm. What makes this event so exciting is that it not only involves the Digital Making Seminar students but also the students from Dr. Deana McDonagh and Jim Kendall‘s studio class as well as Jeff Ginger‘s Marketspace class. Although the point of the event is to provide the space and resources for the participants to make their ideas come to reality and not to compete against each other, because many external people see the value of what we are doing, we have judges, sponsors, and expert users and mentors to guide us through the progress.

As the date of the event approaches, Dr. Vishal Sachdev, our professor for the course, set up a pre-event, where the participants came together to meet each other as well as some of the mentors and expert users. The pre-event began with the introduction of the make-a-thon with details regarding the schedule and the resources that we would have access to. From the Fablab to Architecture Annex on campus, we are fortunate to have been provided with access to many resources. We are all very excited to utilize the resources to develop on the ideas that we have worked on so far throughout the semester.

While sharing the details of the event, Dr. Sachdev, as well as Dr. McDonagh, reemphasized that the purpose of the event is to design with the expert users and mentors in different opportunities that have been identified. We are not solving any problems or challenges. It is critical for the participants to remember this as we want to constantly keep the users in our mind while constructing prototypes and receive feedback by working with them.

After going through the details of the event, we were introduced to a few of our mentors and expert users as well as new ones. Each one of them took the time to introduce themselves, sharing their stories to inspire us.

John and Isaiah, two of the new expert users that have been introduced, shared how they adapted to the struggles that they faced. For example, John, whose condition does not allow him to have enough grip strengths to use his fingers to pull apart a sock to put over his foot, kindly demonstrated the solution that he found for it.

John’s sock which has been modified to fit his need.

As pictured above, with help from his mother, he simply had three loops sewed around the neck of the sock, allowing him to insert his fingers through them and to tug on them. This simple, yet brilliant idea inspired many of us, encouraging us to think of simple ideas and to look for inspiration from the daily objects. We realized that by doing that, we will be able to come up with things that many users would have access to and find easy to use.

Steve, a representative of Clark-Lindsey, also shared the stories of the residents and their needs in the local retirement community. From the challenges of holding the phones to video chat with the family to the danger of falling due to dementia and pre-Parkinson’s disease, he shared how we can leave a big impact on many different types of users through this event. This sharing inspired some groups, such as the team that is working on developing a product to help the people with prosthetic legs to improve the balance to do yoga, to think of ways to expand the user base.

Afterward, we were provided with opportunities to talk with the expert users and mentors to ask questions and to receive feedback on the ideas that we have been developing throughout the semester. Some teams were also able to talk with students from other classes to see if any of them would be interested in joining the team.

As we continue towards the make-a-thon, most of the teams are moving into the prototyping phase. So far, we came up with many different ideas and developed on them, constantly receiving feedback from the expert users. However, we understand that there will be different challenges that will arise when we try to make the ideas tangible, which is why prototyping is important. From low fidelity prototypes to 3D designing through Fusion360 and printing the product, we will be experimenting with different ways to develop the prototypes. We are all very excited to continue to work on our ideas and look forward to presenting them during the make-a-thon!

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Setting the Pace for the Make-a-thon

This week, instead of holding a regular class, we had an opportunity to come together with the rest of the Make-a-thon participants. Make-a-thon is a 3-day capstone event for our course, where the goal is to develop a working prototype of the idea that we have been working on over the semester by the end of it. Just like any other make-a-thon or a hackathon event, there will be a panel of judges to select the best prototype/idea, and prizes, including a 3D printer, will be given out. What got me excited about this event is that it is not only us, the Digital Making Seminar students, participating in it but there are students from the Accessibility + Design course, as well as other design and making courses and programs across the campus who will be participating in it. With everyone working on the theme of accessibility, I am glad that this event is open to more people and hope that it will continue to expand over the years.

It was exciting for me to see a room full of participants and the mentors, all buzzing with various ideas. With so many people present, I could not wait to see the different ideas that they were exploring and what would come out by the end of the event.

Getting Inspired by the Mentors and Expert Users

Another important part of the meeting was being introduced to new mentors/expert users and hearing their stories. One of the most inspiring stories that I heard was from John, an expert user, who has conditions that do not allow him to have the necessary grip strengths on his hands to pull a sock apart to put it over his foot. He shared the challenge of this as well as how he overcame it. His solution was to attach three loops around the neck of the sock, through which he can insert his fingers and pull it over his foot. It was an extremely simple, yet brilliant idea.

This reminded me of the phrase “simple is the best” and made me reevaluate the ideas that my team and I are working on. To ensure that our product is usable by a large user base, we need to make sure that the idea is simple and clear enough that it can be used easily. As an idea develops and makes progress, I think it is very easy to lose the initial goal or a mindset that the idea was developed from due to the excitement and the desire to do more. However, since the ultimate purpose is to allow the users to use the product easily, we always need to be conscious of them. John’s story inspired me to look around the daily objects to see if they can be modified to help with the opportunity that my team and I have identified.

Team Rotam

With the new inspiration and energy from the participants, my team and I gathered during the breakout session to talk about our ideas further. While discussing, we realized that we have several ideas but it would be more helpful to have them be tangible to determine whether they are viable options or not. Therefore, we are looking to develop on the ideas further and create a few low fidelity prototypes of each to test them out. We expect challenges from transferring our ideas to tangible products, but we are also very excited to see how they will turn out. We believe that with tangible prototypes, we will also have an easier time demonstrating our ideas to Ryan to receive his feedback, which is why this is very important.

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Make-a-thon

This week we got an introduction to the Make-a-thon. The participants of this event go beyond our Digital Making seminar course. Its expanded to Industrial design students from Dr. Deana McDonagh and Jim Kendall’s course, as well as students from Jeff Ginger’s Makerspace. This pre-event to the actual Make-a-thon gave us a general overview of what was going to take place leading up to the weekend long event. Later during the session there was a panel of a few returning experts and a few new ones. Some new faces were Isaac, John, and Steve. They all spoke about their disabilities and the daily frustrations they face. The panel even discussed some of the unique ways they’ve adapted to make the best of their situations.

John’s sock with three attached loops
Joh’s sock with three attached loops

Above is an image of one of John’s sock. I thought this was so simple, yet very effective. Apart of John’s condition is very minimal grip strength. So task like putting on socks or buttoning a shirt is difficult to him. A simple life hack he came up with was sewing loops on the outer edge of his sock, which he can fit around his fingers and pull on the sock. It crazy to think this is all it took and it making a huge difference.

Steve from the panel also gave us an overview of Clark Lindsey, which is a  premier retirement community for today’s accomplished adults. From the presentation he gave I found there to be quite some opportunity in this specific sector. He put a heavy emphasis on fall prevention. Maybe we can design some sort of new innovative thing around this opportunity.

The last part of the Make-a-thon pre-event was a social portion. This time was for everyone to meet and talk amongst each other. Since we’ve been working on our project for sometime  used this portion to to talk with some of the new experts and students to see if any wanted to get involved. We did meet a potential new team member from Jeff’s makerspace seminar. She seemed very interested in what it was Solestice is trying to do. After this It really just turned into a team meeting where we mapped out what we needed to from the session up until the Make-a-thon itself.


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Preparation Is Key

THE PLAN.

This week, instead of regular class, we had a Pre-Event for our capstone Make-A-Thon event. At this event, we previewed our schedule for the Make-A-Thon weekend and got to meet some new mentors and participants. All three classes participating in the Make-A-Thon were present (which includes Vishal’s Digital Making class of which I am a part of, Dr. McDonagh’s Accessibility + Design course, and Jeff Ginger’s Makerspace seminar). During the night, we had a panel of wheelchair users talk to us about what people with disabilities really wanted out of the Make-A-Thon – a chance for innovators to learn to use empathetic design, include humanizing language in their vocabulary, and create tools which can help make daily living easier. They are not asking us to solve particular “problems” or find “solutions” to the difficult aspects of their lives, rather they want to take the opportunity to collaboratively innovate with us.

The panel itself, included Adam Bleakney (one of our mentors and Coach of U of I’s wheelchair racing track team), Isaac (an U of I freshman), John (an U of I sophomore), Ryan Wilson (an U of I alumnus), and Steve (a representative from Clark-Lindsey). Each member of the panel described to us some frustrations they had with their daily living and helped us understand more about the disabilities they had as well as what sort of innovations they have created as a result.

Below is a picture of what all of John’s socks look like. He has attached three loops because his condition means that he has no grip strength in his hands. With the help of the loops, he is able to independently put his socks on via putting his fingers through the loops!

Additionally, not only did Steve tell us about his own experiences, but he also related to us the experiences of the residents of Clark-Lindsey. Clark-Lindsey is a local retirement community that Steve works at. At Clark-Lindsey, many of the elders have problems such as dementia or pre-Parkinson’s disease which makes some daily living actions difficult, such as walking (and therefore tripping often) or not being able to hold a phone steadily (which makes Facetiming family and grandchildren difficult). Steve talked us through the most common difficulties and proposed that those without a current project help out with some of them. Although I am already working with my team on our attachable treads, one quick idea I had thought of was to use a music stand to help those with trembling hands hold a phone, tablet, or book still for use.

The final part of the Pre-Event had us mingling with the other students as well as the new mentors to create some project ideas. As we already had our own project that we have been working on throughout this semester, my group ended up having a team meeting about the extra research we would need to do in the upcoming days in order to be fully prepared for the Make-A-Thon event. We also talked to a prospective new team member that is a student from Jeff’s Makerspace seminar.

DIGGING AROUND.

Since we did not have a formal workshop class this week as we usually do, I want to also recap some of the other learning that we are doing in class that has not been mentioned before. We have a class forum on a site called Yellowdig where each member of the class can post news articles about the different innovation tools we come across in our lives. This could be extra research on anything we have learned in class that we were particularly interested in or even just articles relating to maker culture and current innovations. In the past week, I have posted a couple interesting articles I have found online. One article was about Odyssey Innovation, a company that makes kayaks out of sea plastic and the other was about Stanford and Apple Watch’s research.

I found these articles interesting for a couple reasons. First, for the article about Odyssey Innovation talked about using a business model as a tool for promoting recycling. While I would like to believe the best of people, the current amount of recycling being done is still not enough – whether this is due to a lack of time, lack or caring, or lack of accessibility. However, if a business model were used, I can see that being enough of a motivator to increase the amount of recycling being done. It is an interesting concept that I think should definitely be explored further by activists.

Next, the Stanford and Apple Watch research was interesting to me in that it is a possible way to make medical information more readily available. While Apple is adamant that their products are not medical grade and therefore cannot give completely accurate results and should not replace doctor’s visits, the application of Apple Watch in sensing irregular heart rates seems to be something that can help discover early indications of heart problems and give users a heads up as to when to visit the doctor. I feel like there could be some really cool applications for the medical field to explore in conjunction with Apple, and I hope that they continue to develop their research.

Finally, one article that my classmate and fellow Solestice teammate, Trevor Sibby, posted was actually about a startup that he is a part of: Nouvo. Nouvo aims to create a smart pacifier that can sense the pH level and temperature of a baby’s saliva in order to help discover problems earlier rather than when symptoms start to show themselves. It is incredibly inspiring to work so closely with someone who is working on technology with such potential.

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Week 10: Initial Introduction to the Make-a-thon

Rather than having our regular class time, we attended an introduction to the Make-a-thon this week. In this session, we learned about the schedule of the Make-a-thon, the tools available during the Make-a-thon, and the prize. More importantly, we got a chance to learn the stories of more mentors and learn how we should think about the larger target user base other than just the mentor we are working with. In addition, we got a chance to interview and connect with these mentors at the end. Through this chance, we gain additional inspiration from these mentors.

Inspiration from more mentors

During this session, we met Adam and Ryan, but we also met new mentors, including John, Isiah, and Steve. They brought their stories and how they adapt to the struggles they once faced. In addition, Steve brought the stories and the needs of residents living in Clark Lindsey as well. Learning about the needs of residents living in Clark Lindsey, I found that there is a huge need for fall prevention, and this is very similar to my team’s pursuant in designing a product that can help people improve balance during yoga practices and can potentially expand the user base to people who may experience balance issues in their every-day life.

Changes in ideas

Initially, my team has the idea of designing a yoga prosthetic to replace the prosthetic for daily usage for amputees because there are running prosthetic and ballet prosthetic in the market, and a yoga prosthetic may help amputees as well. However, with the thinking of increasing the user base in mind, we are also considering whether we should design an attachment instead now. But when the product wants to reach a greater user base other than amputees who love practicing yoga only, we will need to consider how the attachment can be easily attached and not create any misfits in people’s life.

Having this in mind, we asked Steve a few questions during the session on whether he thinks an outside attachment people’s leg may help in maintaining people’s balance. His answer was that it depends on people’s diagnosis because if people do not have the strength to walk, an attachment may not be enough to help in fall prevention.

Things to do in the future

With this constraint in mind, my team will need further discussion on the feasibility and functionality of the idea of an attachment, how we can make small changes to our ideas to fit the need of a larger user base, and whether we should focus on fitting the need of the smaller user base (amputees who practicing yoga or people who want to practice yoga) for now. Moving forward, we will need to create more low fidelity prototypes to test out our ideas and the functionality of the design.