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.