This week’s class was jam-packed with new information, new perspectives, and new brainstorming techniques! To start, we had a speaker who has a lot of expertise when it comes to the applications and vast expansion opportunities for 3D Printing. In particular, he discussed the possibilities of 3D Printing in the healthcare industry. For example, surgeons are able to create 3D models of their patients’ organs to best understand how to go about the surgery with less unknowns. Being able to interact with the patients’ internal issues in a 3-dimensional space is groundbreaking and can be incredibly helpful in applications such as tumor removal.
Next, we had Jeff discuss the resources on campus that will help our groups bring our ideas to life. Jeff is the head of the CU FabLab by the agriculture library that I was able to visit last week for research. He even highlighted one of the master’s students that I spoke to when I visited! Overall, his space and his team have a lot of different tools and expertise to share with our teams to complete our projects. Most interestingly, Jeff touched on the new Center for Design that is being built behind the Business Instructional Facility. It will be very interesting to hear about how that new space helps tie together students from across campus and bring attention to all of the awesome resources.
Lastly, we began a brainstorming activity that revolved around storytelling. From our research last week, we discussed the different emotions and motivations that go into the opportunity our team is presenting on. In the end, we had four categories filled with various activities and emotions that all connect to our project with Jenna to make sure she can participate in all aspects of yoga.
Lastly, our group was able to conduct more research toward the end of the week. On Saturday, I was able to meet with an ARC yoga instructor. She is a senior who has been teaching yoga classes since her freshman year. She had a lot of great insight overall on how our solution needs to fit with the flow of classes, and the different varieties of yoga that exist. Additionally, she noted a story of a woman with a prosthetic who she had had in a few of her classes over the years. This woman had similar balance issues to Jenna, and needed to adapt a lot of the poses to fit her. She had also illustrated a story of how she was a swimmer. When she swims, she wears a flipper on her prosthetic to help even out the power of her legs. She noted that with the flipper on, her balance while walking around the pool deck was improved because of the increased surface area and flexibility. This is incredibly applicable to the opportunity we are addressing with Jenna and I was very excited to share this with her at our meeting today (Sunday). Jenna gave us a ton of helpful information and deeper perspective on this opportunity, and really loved the flipper story. We are excited to start designing for this issue as she would love to use/wear our solution to all of her yoga classes if all goes well!
Hi Samantha,
I personally really like how you and your team are focusing on designing something that will help the intended users have an easier time having fun! I think most of the time when people think of innovation, the purpose of it tends to focus on the functionality and how it would help with daily activities. There isn’t much focus on how we can help others have more fun, which is why I think your idea is wonderful. With you and your team’s help to ease the activities performed in yoga, I think it will have a huge positive effect on the users’ emotional health. Yoga is done many times as a stress-reliever or to calm oneself down. I think it would be frustrating if you are trying to do the activities to achieve that but cannot perform it due to that physical difference. I would be really curious to know what you guys come up with in the end!
I’m not sure if you guys already read through these resources, but this one is an interview with an amputee yoga instructor: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/rob-schware/getting-a-leg-up-yoga-for_b_5019117.html
This one has a list of organizations that offer amputee yoga, so it could also be helpful for you guys to look into: https://www.yogaforamputees.com/resources