Entering week 2, Team Heartache was bright-eyed and ready to take on the world. We eagerly jumped into brainstorming, producing a vast amount of different ideas and components. By the time we had our meeting with the team at THI, we had screened our ideas for each component and had compiled a few clarifying questions to ask. Upon asking our first question, we realized that we had encountered a bit of a problem, and I will have to admit that my heart skipped a beat. Our clients informed us that the tissue we need to move should not be damaged in any way, and our team had made an assumption that the tissue could be punctured in order to attach it to the table.
In the moment I was alarmed as I absorbed the implications of our mistake: having to scrap the majority of our ideas for the “tissue attachment” component of our design. After a few moments, however, I felt relieved. We had caught a potentially grave mistake. This mistake would have had greater consequences if we discovered it a week from now. Luckily, our team was able to recover quickly, holding another brainstorming session and revamping our design criteria within a day.
Moving forward with our reassessed ideas, we ran Pugh screening and scoring matrices and determined two prototype ideas to pursue.
Both designs involve a three platform/table system, with a “red table” as the base, an “intermediate” platform that will move vertically to simulate the lung’s effects on heart motion, and finally a tilting/rocking “tissue table” that will have the tissue sample clamped onto it.
The major differences between the two designs involve how the tissue table will be designed to rock back and forth and how the intermediate platform will move up and down.
We have been able to produce low fidelity prototypes for both design ideas and have ordered the necessary materials to continue iterating and increasing the fidelity.
Our next steps include using SolidWorks to 3D print some of the components, coding the Arduino, and hopefully bringing the device to life.
This past week has definitely been a week full of twists and turns for team Heartache. Our team completed its first round of brainstorming based on the lung/heart motion component and the Saline box exterior component. We also met with our clients at the Texas Heart Institute (THI) Friday afternoon and from the Q/A we had with them pertaining to our device, we found that many of the solutions and mechanisms we had originally brainstormed were not aligned with some of the needs/expectations of our clients. As a result, our team initiated a second round of brainstorming the next week. We also spent some time prototyping these possible solutions
Our team also was able to finalize the design criteria, as shown in the list below:
Cost
Set-up (Measured by the amount of connection points between device and the Saline box apparatus)
Maintenance
Durability
Accuracy of Motion
After our client meeting on Friday, we realized that tissue attachment was going to be reached using clamps, resulting in our team eliminating adjustability as a design objective. Using the ideas our team brainstormed for the different components, several holistic solutions were formed and put through the Pugh scoring matrix. As a result, our team came out with two solutions that we plan to go forward prototyping with. Descriptions of these solutions with pictures of their low-fidelity prototype are shown below:
Solution 1: The tissue table where the tissue is clamped is built on a seesaw with strings being used to mimic the heart contraction using a rocking motion. The seesaw is built on a middle platform with one pole running through the center with strings being used again to this time create the vertical motion of the heart caused by the lung.
Solution 2: The tissue table is built on an axle with a string running through both ends of the platform to create the same rocking motion. The axle is built on a second platform that is also attached to a set of tracks where the vertical motion will be mimicked by strings once again.
This week was also marked by some interesting workshops pertaining to coding, 3D printing, and CAD. Luckily, our team was able to gain a clearer understanding of the design criteria before any major prototyping was completed, but this week has taught much about the importance of a design team constantly being on the same page with its clients.
Yay week 2! We had some fantastic and thought-provoking lectures this week. My personal favorites included the Designing for Usability lecture by Jake Johnston, Magdah Omer’s Biosocial Approach to Design, and Dr. Gobin’s Brainstorming Workshop.
Magdah, a bioengineering student here at Rice and a TA for the program, gave this, honestly, surprisingly fantastic presentation. I say surprisingly because I wasn’t sure what to expect based off of the title “Biosocial Approach to Design”. She provided examples of well-intentioned, and well-funded global health ventures that went south. The main program for discussion was the infamous play-pump. Honestly, with the introduction to the non-profit, I was impressed with the level of intricacy. Here it seemed as though play-pump had not only repaired unnoticed leaky and contained hand pumps, but created an innovative mechanism to effortlessly pump water and allotted the community more time. Not only that it was financially sustainable and created jobs. It’s one thing to create something like a merry-go-round water pump, but it’s another thing to make that cool new invention in a successful venture. However, that was not the case for play pump. It turns out that the technical design of the pumps was faulty, the massive adoption of the pumps replaced the functional hand pumps, and school children were not a sustainable solution to pump enough water for the community. It all fell through tragically and the mention of play pump in some southern African countries is synonymous with a curse. This is a disheartening story because the people involved were designing for essentially, their neighbors in-country. I previously worked on a year-long capstone project on a project pitched by an American NGO wanting to solve a problem in rural LMIC. Basically inaccessible users to us student designers in America. We made several efforts to see if we had connections that could lead to connections of people who might have a connection to who we were designing for to no avail. From there we tried to brainstorm adjacent users to interview. Of course, still, those users were “worlds apart” from our core users. Finally, we were able to find a marketeer who created products in the same industry as us to share how their conduct users’ needs. $40,000. $40,000 is spent on a door-to-door market research team that interviews the specific market they were creating for [think 20-25-year-old female college students in Nairobi]. Even then, she warned us that the people that we were designing for are essentially inaccessible and there currently isn’t a sustainable market to sell our product to get to them. Additionally, countries are moving away from financing unsustainable ideas. All in all the global health space is filled with layers and layers of complexities.
Dr. Gobin’s Brainstorming workshop was engaging and hilarious. She whipped out a bunch of cards (I need to find out what the card game is called so I can get it for my baby cousins) and had us fully enthralled in a brainstorming game. Essentially everyone received a certain amount of seemingly random miscellaneous items and two user cards. Our users included a ninja and a hippie and we had to figure out what problem they had in common to solve. Of course, we wanted to design for a shared issue that had a large and trending market, sustainable fashion. As a result, our team was able to generate the most brainstormed solutions out of the cohort.
Now in terms of BVM aka Team BreathEasy aka Team Breezy, we were able to meet with a couple of members of the Rice EMS team. We were super thankful for them sharing their experiences and hours to be interviewed and for us to conduct a short usability assessment of the current device. We quickly learned of different pain points that we hadn’t uncovered ourselves. But best of all we were assured that there was indeed a need for a monitor that we are designing. With this user feedback, we were able to rapidly brainstorm ideas and create an informed set of design criteria.
Hi again everyone! I’m back with another week of updates from our time at the OEDK. One noticeable thing that I’d say has made a huge impact on the mood of the internship is that everyone is starting to become really close, which is really nice because now we can all just hang out and joke around. It has made the environment so much better at least for me, because I was kinda nervous for at least the first week just coming in as someone who doesn’t go to Rice. But now I feel really comfortable around everyone, especially my team and it has made the work more enjoyable and everyone more productive. I think the picnic we had last week really helped as well, because we all got to hang out in a non-work environment which was new but I feel like everyone had a good time. I really enjoyed just kicking a soccer ball around with some people and just talking about random stuff. Unfortunately, I had to leave early to go to the Astros game but I was actually lucky because as soon as I got in my car, it started pouring so it was good that I left early.
Continuing on in the week, we moved into something I was really excited about which is prototyping. This was finally something closer to my forte in design and building so that made me really excited to do that. Firstly, we had to identify design criteria to use in our prototyping and that essentially took up all of our time on Thursday and Friday, because we had to come to a consensus on difficult ideas. We came to the decision that we should make five different low-fi prototypes of different ideas on Monday in order to see how things would work together.
On Monday, we did a bunch of low-fi prototyping of all of the ideas, and from there we narrowed it down to three main ideas. Those ideas are to have a swiveling cylinder, the standard LUCIA cylinder, and to have a box that you simply flip over to rotate from supine to prone. On Monday we also received the CAD design for the labia from the LUCIA and we printed the mold at 50% size and made our first casting just out of the silicone rubber on hand in the OEDK. Tuesday we came back, analyzed the first casting, and poured another silicone rubber solution into the mold, while also printing a second mold. We really had an epiphany in the afternoon during our conversation with Grant from Rice 360, who helped us organize our thoughts about materials and decide what to order for the project. We then poured different samples of Dragon skin and Ecoflex 10 and 30 in order to test their elasticity and see how well they would serve us. Right now I’m just really looking forward to keep working on this project and seeing how all of the castings come out on Wednesday!
This past week was off to a great start: we decomposed our problem into different tasks that need to be completed. Chinwe will be working on User Experience testing, this includes creating surveys for users to fill. She will also be an assistant for CAD. On that note, Alvin is the CAD lead who creates models of our prototypes. He will be a Coding Assistant. I will be the coding lead. I am responsible for writing a code for whatever we want our device to accomplish. I will also help with electronics eg breadboarding, soldering and perf boarding. Matthew will be the electronics lead and will help with the user experience.
We also finalized our design criteria, created a PCC to rank our objectives. The meeting with the REMS ( Rice Emergency Medical Services was extremely helpful because now we have an understanding of what the user wants. We brainstormed more than 50 ideas but we did it by components and functions. Week 2 was definitely a great experience for our team.
Week 2 has been a period of growth, both for me and for our project. With my team, we finalized our design criteria; we brainstormed and evaluated potential solutions; and we realized we are not restricted to making the Steribox, well, a box. However, perhaps the most important growth came not in our design, but in our approach.
Something I’ve observed in all of my global health classes and experiences is the emphasis on a “horizontal” transfer of resources and ideas. It is an integral part of any approach to improving healthcare at the grassroots level. Accordingly, when we created our design goals and objectives, we wanted to make sure they were in line and came from those who will use our device, and thus “usability” became an important criteria. However, a “horizontal” approach cannot end here.
This week was marked by workshops and lectures about biosocial and human factors engineering, microaggressions and user-centric design. We also met again with our collaborators from Houston, Tanzania and Malawi. Through all of this, we started to see how a “horizontal” approach meant that all of our design criteria had to be inspired from those who will use the device. This meant “sustainability” should not just encompass locally sourced materials, but also the ease of maintenance and reproducibility. “Efficiency” was no longer the rate of sterilization of masks, but also the dosage of UV light which optimized recycling. Our entire perspective suddenly shifted as we began thinking beyond what we had in front of us.
Once we had our design criteria, we started brainstorming for potential solutions. Among these, we had everything from oil drums and frisbee-shaped UV lights to triangular prisms and UV curtains (credits to Vanessa for the drawings!).
We all hitchhiked off of each other and added unique perspectives to each idea. After brainstorming, we evaluated our solutions, again keeping in mind all of the lessons we had learned throughout the week. By the end, we had two main mechanical designs that we wanted to prototype. While we will be doing the majority of prototyping throughout week three, I’m going to leave a few sneak peeks at our initial low-fidelity prototypes (click the gifs to play them!). I’m excited for where this project is headed!
Let me preface this post by saying I am not an emotional person. I don’t cry at graduations or weddings, and you certainly won’t catch me shedding a tear over a movie. So when I nearly broke down in the middle of a workshop on ethical innovation by Magdah (one of our TA’s), I immediately recognized two things: one, global health innovation is both extremely important and extremely easy to mess up; and two, I am on exactly the path I need to be.
When I walked through the Sallyport my freshman year at Rice, I was determined to complete a Bioengineering degree so that I could work on medical devices as a career. I had the privilege to work on a catheter prototype with Biomedical Engineering graduate students at UT Austin during high school, and my excitement from that experience inspired me to pursue Bioengineering at Rice so that I could design medical devices.
As I reflected more on my personal motivations, I began to realize that in order to feel fulfilled in my career, I would need to have a direct impact on others. Something about the look on the face of someone I’m tutoring when a concept clicks, or the determination of working alongside Nicaraguans to build a house, gives me joy in a way that nothing else can. So this presented me with a dilemma: engineers often don’t get to work directly with their users or make an obvious impact on the population. Medical devices are extremely important and lifesaving, but so often the engineers who create it aren’t able to see the impact of their work.
I then stumbled upon the Global Health Technologies program at Rice, which combined my interest in working with Nicaragua and other low Central American countries with my Bioengineering studies. Fast forward 2 years, and I’m now a Rice 360 intern. Yes, I’ve been very excited about the practical experiences I would gain here–the engineering design process, prototyping, international communication, and much more–but I didn’t truly think about the global health aspect of the internship until Magdah’s workshop.
During the discussion, we focused on the example of the Roundabout PlayPump, a clever but misguided project which sought to facilitate clean water access for South African families. Although the children initially enjoyed playing on the pump, eventually they lost interest and the brunt of the pumping work fell on the mothers who, according to Dr. Taylor, described the experience as “humiliating” and “degrading.” In fact, so strong was the failure of the PlayPump that the word itself became taboo in the country.
What went wrong? The engineers working on the project were capable, intelligent, and inventive. They had no malicious intentions, but simply suffered from a case of design mismatch. As we’ve learned in our workshops, it is very important to keep the user at the forefront of the design process, since they will be the ones interacting with the technology. However, the PlayPump disregarded the desires of the actual users, the mothers who would carry the water back to their homes, and relied on children to fuel the pump instead. Since PlayPumps replaced existing pumps, these mothers were forced to use the merry-go-round themselves, which was neither dignified nor easy.
This brings me to the first lesson: although brilliant engineers can come up with a promising solution to a major problem, it is so easy for mindsets of colonialism or heroism to get in the way. Humility is vital to the design process: no one knows the need for a technology better than the population who needs it. In designing a solution without heavily and repeatedly involving this population, mistakes–such as the PlayPump–can occur.
My second lesson hit me like a ton of bricks. In feeding off of the passion of Magdah, of Dr. Taylor, of all of the interns in the room, I began to feel restless and jittery. For the first time in a while, I felt uncontainable excitement about a cause. I realized that I was exactly where I needed to be. Yes, I know, I know–that sounds like a line from the end of a Disney channel original movie, but experiencing this much passion took me back to the roots of my anticipated engineering career. Although I enjoy engineering design, my deepest motivation rests on the fact that I need to use my life to make an impact on others. And through ethical global health-centered engineering, I get to do just that.
So, to recap: the need for ethical designers is very present in our evolving world. As we grow in technological advancement, we need to avoid the temptation to place ourselves as the heroes of the story. In my future as an engineer, I hope to keep the target population involved in the design process. And, once COVID-19 is under control, I can’t wait to travel and work directly with the people of Malawi, of Tanzania, of Nicaragua, and so much more.
Thank you for making it to the end of this blog (sorry! I get verbose when I’m excited). I hope that you were able to get a clearer idea of what motivates me to be a Bioengineer, and are able to carry a bit of my enthusiasm with you 🙂
Team Petri-FI began this week with a mission and a strong attitude. On Monday, we would get to see the previous Minicubator prototype, and later that afternoon we would meet with a member of the freshman design team, Moonrat, who would help us become familiar with his team’s project. On Monday, all of our documents and thoughts about the previous prototypes would merge with reality, and the long transfer of wisdom from the previous teams would begin.
Typically, every team faces roadblocks at some point in a project. Most of the time, they occur somewhere around the middle or the end, when disorganization lowers the threshold of bad luck. For our team, the roadblock was just a few days into our project, and only moments after we received the Minicubator prototype. First, we noticed some heat damage on the insulation layer, where the foam had expanded out of the confines of the incubator. The prototype was clearly not stored in its completed form, so some assembly was required to connect the battery, Arduino board, and the incubation chamber together. We plugged in the embedded heating pads and thermometer as best we could to the printed circuit board, plugged everything into the battery, and flipped the switch.
Magic smoke trailed out of the circuit board, and we could immediately smell the consequences.
While some of us were calm, others of us looked at each other, not knowing whether we had completely destroyed every last speck of the Minicubator prototype, or if we had merely damaged the Arduino or PCB. We quickly realized a potential point for a short to occur between our wires, so we applied liberal amounts of electrical tape and reconnected the battery. This time, the screen lit up with the current temperature and some incubation options! The heaters refused to turn on, and there was visible damage to the PCB, but we were somewhat relieved to see the Arduino powered on with a working interface.
Later that day, we met with an enthusiastic member of the Moonrat freshman design team (not Minicubator), who gave us incredible clarity when thinking about the potential for a thermos incubator design. Their previous design worked in a fairly large thermos, and it had some rough spots in the user experience. However, we were happy to know that this was an area in which our team could make considerable improvements, especially with the knowledge and progress that their team had already made.
Following the Process
A colorful board of brainstorming.
Throughout the week, we continued to attend workshops that highlighted the steps of the Engineering Design Process. Fantastic speakers helped us in areas such as defining design criteria, brainstorming, and objectively evaluating solution ideas. It was easy to get lost in the messy timeline of previous incubator projects, but returning to the design process gave our team a clear direction for moving forward. During the week, Team Petri-FI was able to define useful criteria and start brainstorming partial ideas for our design, all the while troubleshooting the technical problems we encountered earlier in the week.
A wonderful highlight of this week was “Morning Standup” at 10:30 each day. These were short discussion sessions with everyone from the internship. Here, each team has the floor to discuss their recent progress, express any challenges they’ve encountered, list their plans for the rest of the day, and ask questions to any other teams. This time is designed to allow teams to learn from each other as we make progress on our own projects, and offer help to each other. After a year of online classes and limited contact with other people, this type of interaction is incredibly satisfying. Whereas online classes and events create the impression that I am working on everything completely alone, morning standup allows me to see other people (in-person!) struggling and working through difficulties of their own. I am honestly getting emotional writing about this, because it means so much to be able to empathize with others, and receive sympathy when we endure our own challenges.
High Ground
A fitting summary of this week would be “modeling.” We are still learning about the challenges of maintaining temperature in our chamber while keeping our battery small, so we designed a spreadsheet of electrical values and heat transfer parameters to help us estimate the power consumption of our incubator. We have used this to design small tests of different heating chambers, which will help us to evaluate some of our solutions and purchase an appropriate battery. When we struggled to test the previous Minicubator prototype, we grabbed a breadboard, and we followed the guidance of the team’s documentation to recreate the circuit ourselves, with wires galore. Since we haven’t been able to test code on the Arduino, I have had time to familiarize myself with the Minicubator code, add comments, and prepare to quickly test code when we get the system working again. Essentially, when we have encountered difficulties, we have spent time gaining the high ground on our problem. From research to brainstorming to breadboarding, we have prepared ourselves for the moment that we make a breakthrough.
The new breadboard, created using Minicubator’s circuit design.
The “magic smoke” incident may yet have been a blessing in disguise. It has encouraged us to take a more objective, distant approach to solving our problem. It has given us time to brainstorm improvements upon previous designs, and it has also forced us to learn more about the Arduino’s code and circuit board. Small adjustments to our team’s plans have guided us to a mindset of innovation rather than immediate construction. Ultimately, we are now in a much better position to make modifications to the circuit, battery, or components. Additionally, we are more than ready to perform heat transfer tests on multiple insulated chambers, once we get the breadboard working. During this internship, I hoped that I would gain some experience with electrical systems, and I have already learned so much from my teammates and other individuals. We are extremely fortunate to have the guidance of wonderful faculty and members of the Rice community who have helped us so far, and we are excited for our progress in the next few weeks.
Wow, I can’t believe another week has already passed and that we are over one-third done with the internship! This week was busy, but also very exciting. One of the first things we did was come up with a team name – we decided upon Now UV Me, Now U Don’t! In the beginning of our week, we spent quite a bit of time continuing to research aspects of the project, specifically materials which we could use in constructing our physical device. Figuring out which materials are available locally has been a big challenge for our team, and has demonstrated the importance of communicating with our clients/partners, as they have the best sense of what is and is not feasible for their settings.
As we wrapped up the majority of our research, our team also began to define our design criteria. Once our design criteria were defined, we used a Pairwise Comparison Chart (PCC) to compare the importance of the design criteria against one another and rank them in order of importance. Our final design criteria, based on the major goals outlined by our clients last week, include (from most to least important):
Maximum efficiency of sterilization
Maximum sustainability of power
Maximize sustainability of materials
Maximize usability
Maximize longevity
Maximize portability/mobility
Minimize cost of manufacturing
Overall, while the criteria themselves were fairly well-outlined from our initial interviews and research, the hard part was coming up with quantitative goals for each one. For example, what defines a material as “sustainable,” and how do you quantify how sustainable it is? We had many long discussions within our team and with our TAs and mentors in order to solve these issues.
One of the parts of the week that I considered most exciting with regards to our team’s progress was brainstorming ideas for our solution. Not only was it fun to come up with and share my own ideas, but it was also very inspiring to hear my teammates’ ideas; I found it fascinating to see how many different approaches we were each able to think of, and how many great solutions we were able to come up with by combining these approaches. Perhaps even more fun was the fact that, after using screening and scoring matrices to narrow down our ideas, we began making low-fidelity prototypes for our two highest-scoring ideas.
Prototype 1 (“Carl”):
This prototype is based off of a design which will ultimately use a 55 gallon oil drum (represented by the cylindrical trash can) as the base/shell, and which will contain a removable frame inside which holds layers of mask-holding rings and UV lights. The frame is attached to a lid, so that when the lid is lifted, the frame can be removed. Though the use of the oil drum will make this device very convenient, the biggest challenge will be finding a way to take the frame all the way out of the device easily (given the height of the oil drum) to replace the masks.
Prototype 2 (“Geraldine”)
This prototype, unlike the first design, is in a box-shape (which will likely ultimately be made of sheet metal). Once again, there are layers of UV lights and mask-holding frames. However, for this prototype, the lights are fixed, and just the mask holders can be taken in and out of the box. This would allow for very easy mask replacement.
Overall, I’m very proud of my team’s progress this week! In the coming days, we will continue finalizing our low-fi prototypes, working through some possible solutions to current issues with them, and potentially starting some preliminary usability testing. We will also discuss our solutions with our international clients to get their feedback.
Non-Project Reflections
Not only did our team have a busy week working on our project, but we also attended a number of extremely impactful workshops. Associate Dean Catherine Clark gave us two very particularly engaging and memorable workshops, one on having difficult conversations and one on microaggressions. The difficult conversation workshop was something that I think will almost certainly prove to be useful to me in the future. I am inherently very non-confrontational, and while this isn’t necessarily always a bad thing, it can also prevent me from advocating for both myself and others. Associate Dean Clark touched on the importance of difficult conversations and provided us with a number of strategies for engaging people in them, which I am excited to try in the future. Furthermore, her workshop on microaggressions was definitely very eye-opening. She showed us many videos and gave us numerous examples of microaggressions, all of which were simultaneously unintentional and extremely harmful. It’s scary to think that we all have such ingrained biases that, even if we are completely well-intentioned, we can easily say something that deeply hurts others. However, I think by learning to recognize these microaggressions, I will hopefully be able to stop myself from committing them; by learning to recognize my biases (even if I can’t completely eliminate them), I can hopefully stop myself from acting on them.
Furthermore, workshops by Jake Johnston (Rice 360 technology team) on designing for usability and by Magdah (one of our TAs) on a Biosocial Approach to Engineering highlighted many important considerations to be made during the engineering design process which may often be overlooked. I think the lessons I took away from these workshops will be important on my current project, especially the importance of considering the context in which you are designing and being sure to talk to and interact with users throughout the entire design process. This may be slightly difficult given our current remote environment and inability to interact with our users in-person, which means our team will have to be very consciously aware of connecting with and involving users as much as possible remotely.
It’s been quite a busy week here on Team Petri-FI. Our second week was spent mostly familiarizing ourselves with two previous prototypes. One device is from a previous freshman design team. It consists of a massive thermos with all the electronics stored inside. The other prototype, nicknamed the Minicubator, uses a 3D printed box. Unfortunately, we had to rip apart the model in order to examine the electronics.
The remains of the Minicubator.Thermos, with pen for scale.Inside of thermos, containing electronics.
Even more unfortunately, when we tried testing the Minicubator’s electronics, we shorted out the PCB. A PCB is a very small, condensed circuit board, about the size and shape of a credit card. Since we found out that the shortest time to order a new PCB is 18 business days (they have to be made custom) and we have about that many days left in our internship, we took drastic measures and recreated the PCB with a breadboard:
Our breadboard and associated wires. The PCB is the green rectangle in the bottom left.
One of my teammates put in all those wires by hand – go Nancy! Now to debug it . . .
After we observed these prototypes, we set our sights on our own design. As a team, we’ve spent a few hours brainstorming ideas for all the different components, such as heating mechanism, type of heating chamber, and how the user will be able to interact with collected data. One of the rules of brainstorming (yes, there are rules) is that wild ideas are encouraged. Here’s a particularly wild one: this awesome heated lunchbox. While the size and lack of extended battery life render this product unfit for our purposes, you have to admit it would be pretty cool to boil spaghetti inside your lunchbox while you’re in class.
Introducing the LunchEAZE. Source: luncheaze.com
The last update for this week regards the UI (user interface). We’ve already decided that our interface will be a small screen with three buttons – up, down, and OK. Now we have to determine how those buttons will be used to navigate through the program. Even though our device doesn’t really have all that many functionalities – basically just to set the temperature, set the time, start and stop the incubation period, and see data – it took quite a while and a lot of thought to plan each screen out. There were only eight screens to design, but we worked for three hours on just drawing out what we want!
Our flowchart for the functionality of the UI.
Team Petri-FI’s next steps are to write a program in Python that can replicate the UI functionality for others to complete usability testing on. This will give us feedback on what works and what is confusing about our layout. We’ll also continue to work on scoring our brainstormed ideas by how well they fit each of our design criteria. Once we do that, it’s go for prototyping our very own solution.
