We started the week of by working on our research plans as well as our opportunity statements. Even though the worksheet included simple questions, it did help guide us by narrowing our research and giving us a more specific direction. We were able to identify our specific needs and the people that we needed to talk to for our product development. Our project idea itself is pretty simple yet none of the members in our groups are familiar with yoga or prosthetic limbs. So, it would be crucial for us to gather information from the experts and that is what my group has set for the coming weeks.
In class today, we had the honor to invited Mike Hansen of EarthSense to share with us his experience on product development and the importance of learning from previous failures. EarthSense is a technology company that is dedicated to developing robots that can collect measurements of crops in the field to provide farmers with information that will help when analyzing plant growth. Since EarthSense is essentially creating a new technology, they have to do a lot of trial and error when it comes to developing the robots. Mike is responsible for designing the hardware of the robots. In his presentation, he mentioned that he does a lot of prototyping when designing the outer shells of the robots. It took Mike a lot of tries to be able to figure out the perfect design and the right materials. Even then, they still had to modify the design based on user feedbacks on their first products. So, I learned that during our creation stage, we should keep asking for feedback and improve our product so that it would cater to our clients more and more.
After Mike’s presentation, we were assigned to our first 3D printing assignment. The assignment was for us to come up with our logo and then 3D prints it. I was a little nervous about the assignment since I am not known for my artistic skills. Fortunately, my teammates Yingyi and Samantha were exceptionally artistic. We decided that our name should be 3DBal with 3D indicating the 3D printing part of our product and Bal is short for the word balance representing the function of our product. Our final design of our logo included our brand name 3D Bal with the word 3D carved in a ball in the bottom and the word Bal on top.
Now that we have our logo, I am excited to move on to the next stage and work on our product.
I think it’s super interesting how you are working with Jenna to help her better perform during her yoga classes. I was really intrigued about what work has been done on the subject and I found this really good article about an amputee who recently opened her own yoga studio (https://www.self.com/story/kelsey-koch-amputee-yoga). In addition, I found another interesting article about the physics behind balance in yoga that might help you identify what parts of the prosthetic you need to focus on if you want to improve Jenna’s balance (https://www.yogajournal.com/lifestyle/plumb-perfect)
Hi I am very interested to see your finished logo! From what you are describing it sounds very creative and unique. I think your takeaway from Mike about continuing to ask for feedback is key. I know in other courses I’ve taken where we spoke about IT System’s Design, continually iterating and gaining feedback from users was also stressed. It is really interesting to see the overlap between what I am learning in design for a tangible product to what I learned previously about designing technology systems.