We started the week with a BANG!

We had a tailgate Sunday, introducing the Malawian interns to typical American independence celebrations. There was plenty of food and laughter had by all, especially when Waheed broke out his newly purchased selfie stick and used it to take a bazillion pictures of everyone inhaling food and making weird faces.

All the interns had Monday off to celebrate the Forth of July, so Karen, Chimwe, Hilary, Mary, Waheed, and I headed over to Hermann Park to watch the fireworks. Though the fireworks were over an hour late, we had fun talking to each other and exchanging stories, and everyone agreed that the spectacular final display was worth the wait. Waheed brought the selfie stick along again, taking another bazillion lovely candids such as the one below!

Then Tuesday, it was back to work. We have now reached a point in our project where the iterative prototyping process has sped up significantly, resulting in us making a new prototype to test almost every single day. Since our goal is build a supportive and safe floatation device for a local boy with special needs, this means we are at the pool almost every single day.

We arrive at the pool with our prototype and mess around with it, straining it to the limits to see potential points of failure and other issues. We do some quick fixes using Gigi’s favorite item: ZIPTIES. One of our official team mottos is “You can fix everything with zipties.”

We’ve gone through over 200 zipties already, thanks to their supreme usefulness. They are easy to loosen, tighten, and cut off as necessary, allowing us to rapidly adjust things while in the water. However, they are very low fidelity and so we set a goal to eliminate all use of zipties in Friday’s final prototyping, sewing nylon straps and strap adjustors instead. Goodbye sweet, beautiful zipties, you served us well while you lasted!

Today, we finished up our high fidelity prototype, ready for testing bright and early Monday morning. Barring some unforeseen catastrophe such as a loose strap or rampaging moose that may destroy our prototype, it is ready to be tested according to the qualitative tests we laid out for our design constraints and objectives. Good progress and go team!