Tag: week 5

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Week 5 Reflection

During the class on Wednesday, we were grateful that we can have our guest speaker to provide us more inspiration and advice related to the 3D-printing. I learned about that 3D-printing can actually benefit lots of fields, such as health products, service dogs, daily-life products, and physical ability. It’s really inspiring that people are utilizing this technique to make other people’s life different.

With the guide from our TA, we posted some of the features related to people that we interviewed last week. Each team shared what they’ve done so far, and I was inspired by some of my peers’ great ideas.

After we finished posting our insights, we found three big categories ” life & career”, “future aspiration”, and “major difficulties” based on the response from our interviewees.

This weekend, we conduct an interview with our mentor Ryan and two of his friends Avery and Zain. They shared their life experience, some difficulties that they’re facing, and expectations of our product. Based on their response, I would say different people have different level of disabilities, and it’s really hard to find a way to benefit all of them. Our project is to help them multitask in their daily life. However, based on the advice from Ryan, Zain, and Avery, I think we might need to consider making our goals more specific and realistic, since there are lots of different ways to define “multitask”. It might be more feasible for us to pursue in one goal – making something that can make certain group of people’s life more convenient, even though a small product focusing on one specific area would work.

I would say we need to talk more about the goals of our project this week and try to finalize a clear and feasible direction. We might need to talk more about it with the professor and our TAs. We should consider about their thoughts and advice towards our project. After interviewing 4 people, I found it’s really important for us to help them, and I really want to. I just want to make sure that we can actually make something that’s useful for certain people by the end of this semester.

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Week 5: Inspiration and New Discoveries

This week started with presentations from 4 speakers. One from Illini Service Dogs, one from John Hornick, another from Jeff Ginger, and last from our TA Mehmet Aydin.

Illini Service Dogs spoke about challenge areas and resources available to continue exploring this challenges. Since for privacy issues it is hard to get a chance to observe actual training, it was useful to hear of different ways research can still be gathered. This can be transferred to all of our projects even if we aren’t working with ISD, as a good reminder that we don’t have to be confined to our mentors for research and also think out of the box to interview people who might have different insights and provide a different perspective. I have a friend who works at Beckwith Residential Services, so my team is planning to reach out to him for an interview.

John Hornick walked us through the scope of 3D printing and reminded us how big of a field it is. It was inspiring to hear all the different projects that have used 3D printing because it is easy to forget how powerful this tool really is.

Jeff Ginger talked about his experience making as well as the Fab Lab. I have visited the Fab Lab several times because because I was first introduced to it through a class freshman year. Since then I’ve gone back to make laptop stickers as the VP Community Service of my business fraternity, and to make a shirt through a developmental workshop with Design for America. One thing he brought up that really stood out to me was the idea of DIWO. Do it with others is an important way to look at design because these kinds of spaces makes it easy to work with others who have different backgrounds and learn from each other.

Finally our TA Mehmet spoke about design from a broader view, talking about the total experience. He discussed the MRI scanners used in hospitals, and how kids were afraid of going in them. He shared that after making them themed in a fun way like a pirate theme, kids were more willing to go inside. This was a great example to hear especially because they didn’t reinvent a product, yet they still changed an experience. This is related to what we’re trying to do in adding a little more joy into our experts lives, and this example is a good learning lesson to how that can be done without changing the core of the product.

He shared that after making them themed in a fun way like a pirate theme, kids were more willing to go inside. This was a great example to hear especially because they didn’t reinvent a product, yet they still changed an experience. This is related to what we’re trying to do in adding a little more joy into our experts lives, and this example is a good learning lesson to how that can be done without changing the core of the product.

We ended the day with an exercise to organize our insights and find an opportunity area from them. My team did 2 interviews last week, so we were synthesizing the insights we got from both of our interviewees.

We came up with multiple categories ranging from school/work life to personal life. After discussing our insights with one of my team members Huan, I discovered an area of interest that I am curious to explore more which is independence. A lot of tasks our users can already do but it requires another person as well. We originally were looking to explore multitasking but I think another element of that is being able to do things by yourself.