This week, we had our first pre-Makeathon class. There was Dr. McDonagh’s art and design students and Maker lab’s students who were also participating in this event. We discussed about when and how this event was going to happen. I’ve heard about Hackathons in our school. However, I never heard about this event called the Makeathon and I am very honored to have the chance to participate in one.
Other people from the DRES came over to help us brainstorm our ideas. Since our team MOVI had a set idea, we tried to expand on how we might improve our ideas. We talked to one of the wheel chair users named Isaiah. He was very cool talking about his experience as a wheel chair user and having hand tremors at the same time. I told him that we were trying to make a knee protection for everyone even for people with hand tremors. When he saw our previous prototypes, he asked if we could make the connection part out of zippers. For people with weak hand strength, it is very hard to utilize items that require grip. Especially garments using Velcro or button-ups are the worst, so they try to stay away from those products. I think this strengthen our prototype and it expanded our user group as well.
John was another wheel chair user with hand tremor who came over to the conference to help us out. He gave us a very compelling story of his special sock, customized by his mother. The sock had two holes on each sides, so John can insert his finger through the hole and them pull his foot. This also gave us the idea of making the zipper hole very big so, people with hand tremors can easily use this circle attachment to put the knee protection on.
Further on, our team will talk with Jenna and Jeannette this week, and study how they fall. We have already came up with some great questions through our “testing protocol” exercise. By watching Jenna and Jeannette fall, we can deduct which part of the protection needs more pad. I think we were very successful during this week and I am looking forward to our talk with our users.
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