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!