We are in the home stretch everyone!!!!!! I cannot believe that we have only one more week left of this internship. It feels like there is just so much more we can research and work on to refine our recommendations and ideas. That being said, I think that we are now in a place where it is valuable to connect back to the Design Studio. I am so excited to be able to present some new recommendations to them, and I really hope that these suggestions help them in the next phase of prototyping.
As the final week approaches, we are preparing full force for our upcoming presentations. Of course we’ll be presenting to the Design Studio, but we also have a showcase where many members of both the Rice 360 community and our affiliates will be in attendance. There, each of team will be “pitching” one of our designs. While I wish we had a physical prototype to be presented, I know that the suggestions we have developed carry their own weight.
My team has decided to share the ways that we envision reiterating the Walk-Through Decontamination Unit. Both in terms of organizing stakeholder feedback and in terms of consolidating our recommendations, we feel that this device has given us both our greatest challenges and rewards. Just to give a snapshot of what we are presenting, we are looking at its accessibility, ease of use, disinfectant selection, use outside of the originally intended public spaces, and determining criteria for testing the unit.
I think that the most interesting part about this decontamination unit is that at first glance, it seems to be very simple. As we got to know it better through the duration of this internship, the intricacies of how the different parts come together challenged us to really focus on how to employ improvements yet ensure it remains feasible within the social and cost constraints we have.
As I have mentioned in a majority of these blog posts, centering our design around the user is the NUMBER ONE priority. We had to really identify how many areas required this kind of reconsideration with this walk-through unit. One of these key pieces that we directed attention to was how to make this unit as accessible and approachable as possible. We had to really consider whether a change in the structure’s shape was worth the monetary strain. I’ll spoil it now and say that we decided it wasn’t. However, we have decided to increase the amount of transparency into the unit and how to use the unit. Each aspect that I listed above received this same kind of scrutiny as we came to our final design recommendations. For right now, I think that I’ve revealed enough about what we have in store. Don’t worry, I will have a more comprehensive review of our decisions in my final blog! Just to give you guys an idea of how this device operates, I’ll provide this diagram of how it works.
I’ll be back with a final recap soon enough!
–Krystal