Tag: #milestonelabs

Posted on

Week 3 Reflection – Challenge to Make an Impact

A slide from Milestone Studios' presentation.
A slide from Milestone Studios’ presentation.

During week 3, we had an online session with Milestone Studios and our mentors to explore how to make a social impact. I was a little bit disappointed that we didn’t have the class physically, because we could have more interactions with the studio as well as our mentors if it were a face-to-face meeting. Still, I gained many insights from the class and now have a clearer view of what to do next.

We started the class by discussing unmet social needs. After seeing some examples of how people overcame those challenges, we were asked to brainstorm the problems that we had encounter in our life and how we overcame them. I was shocked by this activity. I have always considered myself to be a person who has creativity, yet during this exercise, I was unable to think of anything that fitted the criteria. I have had the cases where I identified the problems, yet the solutions that I found were usually too complicated, or I myself didn’t have the technical skill to realize them. Seeing the simple solutions in the examples, I reflected on my way of thinking. In the future, I should try harder to pinpoint the core of the problem so that I can come up with more affordable and more accessible solutions.

Another activity that led to many thoughts was writing the opportunity statement. This is related to the defining stage in the design thinking process. Two new words that I learned was analysis and synthesis. The analysis is breaking down complex problems into smaller, easier to understand pieces. The synthesis is combining small insights into whole ideas. We applied those two concepts when we created the opportunity statement. Filling in the statement, we sparked ideas that we didn’t consider before. Previously when we prepared the presentation slides, we had more plans for Ron and only a vague direction for Ryan. As we brainstormed the opportunity we could have with Ryan, we realized “improving the ability to multitask for people with limited mobility” would be an area with great potential. This idea could benefit not only people with limited mobility when they do tasks such as filming and drawing, but also the general public who may need to accomplish tasks with fewer limbs. In the class, we didn’t have the opportunity to talk with our mentor. Later, I plan to interview him in more depth. One technique that I think would be helpful is the conversation starter which we studied in the reading. I believe this would be an excellent way for us to see how our mentor reacts and we can identify more possibilities.

Posted on

Week 3 Reflection

This week due to the weather, we had a virtual class. I was very excited to use Zoom and I believe the session was still productive despite the weather setback.

I really enjoyed the presentation and feedback from milestone labs. They showed us how to examine opportunities we found in our daily lives and to determine the design need. A great example was one girl shared how she kept losing her keys. Therefore, she decided to put her keys on a hair tie and keep it around her wrist. I too did the same thing last year when I kept losing my keys. I had never even realized this was a design opportunity and how I had come up with an innovative solution to the problem.

Picture showing key on a hair tie (found on google images).

I also really liked learning about assistive devices. I had never before considered how glasses were an assistive device. Other great examples mentioned by my classmates were hearing aids and walkers. It was interesting to see how sometimes a design hack can easily become to universally accepted design. The example given to us by milestone labs was the hack of putting tennis balls on the bottom of walkers. This soon became the accepted design and products entered the market for walkers that were modeled after tennis balls.

I think the presentation by milestone labs gave us a lot of great ideas to consider when moving forward with our project. One of my big takeaways was a design can almost always be improved. Milestone did a great job of pointing out how people come up with design hacks daily and just because these hacks work, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily the best version. We shared our preliminary ideas with milestone labs and one of our ideas was creating a wheelchair cup holder or phone holder. We had initially had this idea however, we conducted some research and realized there were already a lot of products on the market. However, milestone encourage us to ask our mentors how helpful these products were because there is always room for improvement.

Moving forward, our team will be focusing on an idea that Arielle (our preferred mentor) brought to our attention. We will be trying to improve an athlete’s grip on the hand ring of the racing wheelchairs under difficult weather conditions. Specifically, the example we were given was if an athlete is racing in the rain the grip can become slippery and this provides unfavorable conditions. We will be looking to work with multiple textures and we will have to find a way to put a cover on both the top of the hand ring and the sides.

Posted on

Milestone Labs Reflection

Week 3 had a much different look to it as we were iced in due to abnormally horrible winter conditions, but fortunately Milestone Labs and Professor Sachdev were still able to get together and video stream the course. All in all, it was a very enlightening experience which forced us to think about how to approach the design thinking process in accordance with the scope of DRES. This directly tied in with the videos we watched on human centered design.

Milestone ultimately pushed to make decisions – which is huge. Ideation can be an everlasting process, but if there is no action taken, then it will be difficult to see the fruits of your labor. Our collaborative activity brought an additional level of clarity to our project scope. It forced us to brainstorm and prioritize our ideas based on feasibility and look at the impact each could make. We do not want to make flashy devices; we want to make utilitarian products.


Ultimately, I think we moved from the design challenge phase and began planning early stage research methods. Through the guidance and discussion, our group decided that it would be best to pursue the IKEA styled model for wheelchairs. We figured that the best entry point would be to find whichever component is either most frequently or most expensive to replace as this will provide the most lucrative business opportunity while having the biggest impact.

After the online seminar, we are now more confident going forward and can delve right into our work next week. Ron will need to help us in discussing the consistency of wheelchair parts, however if we can find a component which is consistent throughout all models, then that will probably be the better we will attempt to model and 3D print.