Week three kicked in, marking the almost halfway journey of the internship. Throughout the third week, our team continued interviews, our research on potential solutions and more brainstorming! As the process of brainstorming continues, I kept in mind a quote from the brainstorming workshop, “ Don’t aim for perfection, aim for excellence!” Even though I wouldn’t call myself a perfectionist, sometimes I do find it difficult to not want things to be perfect. However, with the brainstorming process, personally, I have learned to put down even the craziest, most “imperfect” ideas. I also learned that creativity and innovation can appear at the most random time, as ideas don’t just come within one sitting. It was interesting for me to notice how I started becoming more conscious of my surroundings, trying to make connections to my project.  

This week we also got the opportunity to attend a low-fidelity prototyping workshop. In lo-fi prototyping, as they call it, the same principles can be applied. As our practice was on an egg drop, I think it is fitting to say we aimed for eggcellence, not perfection this time around. Just in 10 minutes, we finished our prototype, focused on the function, not perfecting minute details about how it looks. And that’s the beauty of lo-fi prototyping, the rapidness, the imperfections, building a tangible concept to see if an idea, previously on paper, would actually make sense in the 3D world. Upon hearing the assignment of building a mechanism that would protect an egg in a drop, I immediately thought of building a parachute, but my team was quick to build a protective layer of balloons. I wanted to reinforce our design by adding the parachute, but in the end, the results showed that the addition would have been unnecessary. Our egg was protected and we won a Rice Coffeehouse gift card! Upon reflection, I learned that simplicity is very important, especially in engineering design. A more simple design would be more intuitive and easier to use, and while looks are important, functions should be nailed down first and foremost. 

                                     

I will continue to apply the lessons I took from the workshop to our team project. Lo-fi prototyping is very fun and I highly suggest you all to use it to take your ideas to life, even for personal projects! 

 

As always, thank you for following my journey this summer. I hope to see all of you again next week! Continue to achieve eggcellence! (I will stop with the egg pun now 🙂