Tag: Week 4

In last week’s class, I’m glad that we had Mike Hansen, employee from EarthSense, to come down to the Makerlab and share his experience with us. It’s really inspiring that his company is working on developing robots for agricultural use. I didn’t expect that they put in so much efforts to invent such a lot of different models, and they also need to come up with the best one suitable for their customers. They would also do some customization for different needs from their customers. I find this is a really good idea, because in our group project we also need to consider that the targeted group of people may have different needs and purposes of using our products. This inspired me to explore an idea that can contribute to a more flexible product. Big thank you to Mike for sharing his valuable experience.

Later on, we came up with a team name “Blueprint”, and we designed our team’s logo and started printing it. Actually it’s my first time using a 3D-printer. I thought we would do it by hand, but it seems like after we design the logo in the software it would just do it automatically, which is really convenient and efficient.

Last Friday, our team went to Nugent Hall in order to seek for interviewing the director of Beckwith program. However, we didn’t had his contact information, so we didn’t make an appointment. He was probably off work when we got there. Therefore, we decided to asked for residences who passed by if they’re willing to give us some time to conduct a quick interview. Fortunately, Selina Lee, a Latin major student, decide to helped us. During the interview, we did realize and understand that there are some difficulties that she’s facing everyday. For example, she said it’s really hard for her to hold a drink. This is just one tiny difficulty that she’s dealing with everyday, but it also may be a big problem for lots of people who have the same experience as her. After the interview, we had a better understanding of the need of people who have disabilities. This provided us one possible direction that we can work on.

This Sunday, one of our group member Saloni, reached out to her friend from high school and made an appointment to interview Avi M Samuels. We asked him some similar questions as what we asked Selina, such as future career path, what they do in their spare time, and what the difficulties are in their daily life. He’s really friendly person and he see things comprehensively and meticulously. He provided us lots of valuable perspectives and potential resources that we can reach out to. Overall, we really appreciate his help and thanks him for taking his time doing the interview with us.

We look forward to making more progress in the next week. We’ll probably interview our mentor Ryan next week. Due to his busy schedule, we failed to get the chance meeting with him. Each member in our team will do research on different fields. Hopefully, we can come up with a more specific idea about the product that we’re about to design.

We started this session off by learning from Mike Hansen of EarthSense. EarthSense helps farmers leave the tedious task of measuring crops up to robots. His knowledge and story was great to hear because he showed us how design plays out within a company. He also talked about the observations that were made when watching farmers use the robot on site. This allowed them to find out things like they liked to put stuff like papers on the robot. This is a good example of how observing a user can help lead to more discoveries. He also showed us how many different variations of different pieces he has made and that’s a good reminder of the fact that although the end result is really cool and exciting, the process can be long and it is important to trust that it will eventually result in a useful product.

This week we also made a company name and 3D printed the logo. One of the former members of my team dropped the course, so I also met our newest team member Eric. We decided to name ourselves blueprint because we thought it was similar to the drafts of making designs as it is usually used as a paper version of a model for architecture. We sketched many designs to try to make something that encompassed the name, but finally working on the software itself led us to our final design.

Finally we talked about what we will do going forward in terms or research. We agreed we needed to do some more interviews. On Friday my team went to Beckwith Residential Support Services in Nugent to see if we could find anyone to talk to. We had a hard time getting in at first but then discovered we could just call the front desk so we didn’t have to wait for someone to come out or go in.

After getting in we asked the front desk if she had the contact info of anyone we could speak too. She told us to check if anyone was in based on the hallway of offices, but unfortunately since it was past 5 PM no one was there.

We spotted someone coming up and were nervous to approach a stranger and see if they would be willing to be interviewed at first, but after asking she was very willing to be interviewed. Her name was Selina, and she is studying Latin. We spoke about a lot of things like what she does in her free time and what she wants to do for her career. Something that would help her is something that could help her grab stuff.

We decided to also interview someone else this week, so I reached out to a high school classmate, Avi, who lives in Beckwith.

We met with him today, and had a very in-depth conversation about his career goals and his experience. He spoke about having more door openers at public buildings and coming up with a way to preserve historic site while also making them more accessible. I had to leave early, but he gave my teammates some more people to talk to.

Our interview with Avi really made me realize how much opportunity there is in this space. We were able to get a better glimpse into his life and I am looking forward to continue to interview more users to better understand how we can help them multitask.