If I talked to you last week about reaching out to professionals in the field, I would say I wasn’t terribly confident in relaying my thoughts. After this week, I would say that my confidence has grown, and I realize how much I still have to learn about engaging with stakeholders with all sorts of expertise. This week in particular has taught me what it means to really be engaged with a variety of experts and how to synthesize the feedback with which we are provided.
Overall, this has been an amazing week!! With each passing day, the stakeholders gave us new information to help us make substantial progress on the trajectory of our devices. It also gave us a chance to really understand the scope and areas for which needs-finding can be conducted. While my brain is a little bit overwhelmed with all of this new information, I’m extremely excited about how much more we now understand, and also how much wider the scope of these prototypes can be.
The way that these interviews have really opened both the perspectives and attitudes that we have for how to proceed towards our final recommendations is super cool. These interviews have also really brought attention to our users. As I’ve commented on before, neither the decontamination unit nor the automatic hand sanitizer are common devices in Malawi. There have also been challenges for us in terms of determining the best designs to accommodate available resources. However, with our stakeholders’ advice, multiple new avenues for how we develop these prototypes have come to light.
One of the most intriguing pieces of advice we received was from Dr. Caroline Soyars, from the University of Michigan. She recommended that we really expand our search process to include open source designs and models that can inspire our own concepts. Another amazing piece of advice we received was from Mr. Brian Kamami. He told us how important it is to test our devices with our end users as often as possible. By communicating with these users, we would really be able to understand the benefits and the less friendly aspects of these devices. I think sometimes in the design process, whether it’s in engineering or in developing any plan, we get too engrossed in creating what we think is the most desirable outcome. In actuality, we could never know the best outcome without seeking the feedback of our users. Our users really are the ones who know what is most feasible for them. Having heard this from several seasoned engineers dedicated to serving Malawians, I learned a valuable lesson. An initial product doesn’t need to be perfect because it is crucial that throughout the process, users’ opinions shape the end goal. This has also taught me to be less afraid of the initial mistakes of a work in progress because that is what most projects are: a work in progress.
Marching ahead with refreshed spirit, we’re really looking forward to this final phase of our design proposal. While collecting all of the feedback throughout this week, we have amassed a crazy number of new ideas. Being able to review and process these new ideas really helped us with our direction. I cannot wait to let you all know what we have in store for the decontamination unit and hand sanitizer.