This week was a little more tough than I had really expected. Going into this past week, we had been making such good progress so far and it felt like we were making huge strides every day. I really felt like we were going to be almost done with the project by the end of the week, but of course that’s where the struggles set in. To begin with, I spent basically all day on Monday and most of Tuesday working on a modified CAD file for the labia mold we were using. Our client had said in our last meeting that it would be better to have more surface area on our labia and to essentially turn the labia into more of an oval shape by expanding the sides. However, the challenge was just exactly how to do that. I worked with one of the TAs, Magdah, on Fusion 360 to try and edit the file to keep the main labia shape intact while expanding the sides. This gave us a lot of trouble, because the file we were working with was made by the LUCIA team, and we didn’t really know how they made it. Not getting too into the technical details of it, it basically took us a long time to even expand the edges of the mold at all, let alone try to shape the new edges of the mold. 

 

Unfortunately, when we met with our client again we discovered that all of the work on the CAD file was for naught as she didn’t think we needed the oval shape anymore. I guess there had been a miscommunication about what our model looked like (Possibly because our model that we showed the previous week was clear and she couldn’t see it well on the camera). We basically had to reset after that since the rest of the team had been working on attachment mechanisms for oval labias to the base and those were all scrapped as well. It was honestly very upsetting to hear that your work from the past two days is now useless and not needed. Also, we were corrected on dimensions in that meeting so we had to change the dimensions of everything we had been working on too. For the first time in the project, it felt like we were at a standstill.

 

Luckily, after that meeting we talked with Grant, a design specialist from Rice360 and he put us in a good direction. I’m going to talk about all of those updates next week however, so be sure to check out my blog then!