This week we get the chance to learn how to use Fusion 360. Our guest speaker Dan Banach from the Autodesk gave us a great workshop about introducing how to use this application and leading us to build our own phone holder. At first, I had no clue of how it works. I had some experience in using editing application such as Lightroom and Final Cut. Since Autodesk is also from the Adobe, I thought it’s gonna be similar with those apps. However, I was wrong about it. This was definitely a brand new experience to me. Throughout the process, I got lost a few times. My teammates and Dan came to help me a few times, and they helped me to finish my phone holder.
To be honest, by learning how to use Autodesk Fusion 360, I found it really helped us to put our thoughts into reality. Sometimes we only come up with simple thoughts and ideas, but we didn’t really have more specific information about our products. By learning more and more technical skills of designing, we can put our ideas into the app and model it. Also, we can actually print them and test it out, since the plastic material is not too expensive. No matter speaking from expense or environment side, Fusion 360 and the 3D printers benefit us a lot. I’m really interested in next week’s activity in Fablab. Hope we can learn something that can help us to get closer to our product.
During the How Might We assignment, our group came up with three insights:
- How might we create a way for wheelchair-users to see what’s behind them?
- How might we create a way for wheelchair-users to grab some object more independently?
- How might we design an affordable assistive tool?
I was kinda freak out about our progress, since I thought that we didn’t actually have a specific idea about which area we should focus on. However, my teammates and TA encouraged me that we were still at the stage of brainstorming and working on this question. I realized that we need to conduct more interviews with more wheelchair-user and find out what is the most feasible and helpful plan that we can work on. Probably, Arielle’s suggestions would be helpful. We might need to try to make an appointment with her in the next week. I hope we can have more progress on our project and get more familiar with deigning applications and skills.
Hey Eric!
I’m glad you had a good first experience using 3D modeling software. I’ve been using it for a few years now, and it can be really fun once you get the hang of it. I agree that it is a really cool process to be able to get your ideas out of your head and onto the computer in a 3D form. I would agree with your teammates, don’t freak out about not having an idea yet! They take time and often you will go through a lot of ideas before you land on a final one! It’s about the process 🙂
I agree that using Fusion 360 was a big step in helping us turn our ideas into actual products! Additionally, I really relate to what you said about feeling a little bit freaked out by not having as much progress as I expected. While I was reading your first How Might We statement, I had a random thought, which might be able to help you: what if your team designed something like car mirrors that let wheelchair users see behind them? It’s just a suggestion, but I figure I’d let you know in case that helps you come up with your ultimate product.
Hi Eric, I agree that using Fusion 360 is really a way for us to get our product idea into a real product. I think one more powerful feature that the software has is that we are able to use it for subsequent customization and revisions without losing the original model. Also, subsequent refinements can be made easily without the need of starting over again on the design. I think this is extremely helpful when we are going to create multiple prototypes for our product in the future, and this reduces the time cost of “fail early and fail often”.