This week, we have moved from the ideation stage and have started our focus on rapid prototyping. Instead of having our regular Wednesday morning class, we had our session on Tuesday evening. Due to conflict with my other course, I was unable to attend the session myself. However, I got updates from friends and teammates about the process and things we covered in the session. The session itself focused on preparing for Makeathon, the event that we are going to participate in a couple of weeks, and we were introduced to resources and opportunities about that event.
The whole session was taken with Dr. McDonagh’s Industrial Design class and Jeff’s Fab Lab class, so our class was able to brainstorm and share ideas with more people. We were also introduced to resources such as the Fab Lab, Makerlab, and Architecture lab; when the Makeathon takes place in the future, we are going to have the opportunities to use resources from those facilities. Furthermore, many old and new mentors came to share their ideas and stories in the class and provided new perspectives to us.
To our group, our focus has been on inventing a glove that could help users grab things easier. We intended it to be applicable for people with limited mobility and not enough arm strength. We hoped the users would be able to overcome the obstacle of not able to eat independently; through using our design, the users could enjoy the food with their friends and families without the help of other people. In the session, our group was introduced to the motion of using the knife and fork. This was something that we didn’t consider before. Previously, we focused on the environment that the users would be in when they used the product. We thought about the configuration of the meal setting including how the utensils were placed nearby the users so that it would be easy for them to start using them. We considered the texture of the glove as well so that the glove would be able to accomplish the task that we wanted it to be able to do. However, we didn’t specifically consider the different types of utensils that the users were going to interact with. We didn’t consider how the features of the utensils would influence the interactions, and how we should design the glove in a way that it could accommodate different types of utensils. In the following weeks, we are going to take this factor into consideration, and build a glove that could be more user-friendly.
I am Huan Wu, a leadership-oriented undergraduate student studying Accountancy, Supply Chain Management and Information Systems/Information Technology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
I chose to major in those areas because I am a person who likes to learn new knowledge continuously and take on challenges. The challenges bring me excitement, as I enjoy the feeling of using my expertise to tackle hard issues, find insights and initiate change. I believe having an understanding of different fields allows me to have a broader perspective when I look at issues in business. I aim at improving myself and learning skills to initiate change and make real impacts in the world in the future.
My LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/huan-wu-0507/
Hi Huan,
The problem your team identified with using utensils is very interesting. I can see grabbing individual items as a very different process to using a fork and knife. I think an interesting part of your design is that it needs to be easy to put on. Gloves remind me a bit of socks in how they are put on, like the sock design we saw in class on Tuesday night. Having limited arm strength could affect your ability to put on gloves the ordinary way, so I am very curious to see what your team comes up with!