Seed continues….
This is the third week of SEED 2017 and we are still at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen. It has been cold indoors most of the days. Almost everyone in the group is familiar with the campus and you don’t have to ask for directions anymore. There is no longer silence in the Kitchen as it used to be during the fist week, perhaps everyone has grown some huge teeth, Yeah!! everyone is talking these days. Since we started our projects last week, it has been work all long. Last week we started brainstorming and that took us into Monday of the third week. It was noted that we started brainstorming without doing much research as such we were advised to do research first and then go back to the brainstorming process. As rising stars, we had to take this positively as it will prepare us better before we enter the Engineering Industry which is broad and more complex,just like Dr. Wettergreen said, “Engineering Design is an iterative process”.
On Monday we concentrated much on doing research.Our main areas of focus were, feet sizes, different scanning technologies, causes of diabetes and limitations associated with it etc. Before this we assumed that we knew what we were doing and what our target population needs. But a few hours into the research, everyone was amazed at how little we knew about our target population. For example, we knew nothing about the standard foot sizes of the patients and worse still we knew very little about limitations caused by foot ulcers. This meant that if we rushed into screening the brainstormed ideas, we wouldn’t be solving the problem at hand.
Brainstorming like crazy….Together we made it!!
After the research, we continued with some 4 hours of brainstorming and hitchhiking. We came up with as many ideas as possible and it was awesome. The brainstormed ideas ranged from stationary devices to simple hand held gadgets, mechanical to electrical and computerized. We then created morph charts to form complete solutions from component ideas. Screening is almost through and we believe a better solution is yet to be realized very soon.
Some good stuff about week 3
I recommend these books to all designers. They will put you a step ahead. Don’t just make assumptions about your target users, know something about them.