Moving forward with this project has been both exciting and intimidating. This past week we have worked on creating design criteria, breaking the project down into components, and thoroughly brainstorming solutions for each component: the labia, hymen, attachment, base, and rotation. We created a colorful whiteboard full of brainstormed ideas with each teammate contributing ideas in a different color (I used bright green !). When we read through all the ideas after a certain amount of time of brainstorming, it was really interesting hearing everyone else’s ideas I hadn’t thought of as well as where we had similar ideas. Reading through our preliminary individual brainstorming ideas lead to a lively team discussion and generation of more ideas and initial full solution ideas to consider. As we go through the design process, we will continue considering different ideas and alternatives to our chosen design components, but this was a really effective first brainstorming round. To help guide us in this brainstorming and idea generation phase, we also talked to Grant, the resident materials expert at the internship, about potential materials to mimic the texture and feel of skin and tissue, as well as Yajur Maker, a graduate student at Rice 360 who is currently working on the LUCIA model. The LUCIA is a cervical cancer model which models an adult labia, vaginal canal, and cervix, and can be seen as a similar solution to our PIPER model since it models similar anatomy and has interchangeable cervixes. We are looking to use a scaled down version of the labia mold from this for our PIPER model.

After narrowing down from the 74 different brainstormed ideas into top ideas per component, we used a chart to combine our top component ideas into a set of full solutions. Then, we used Pugh screening and scoring to narrow down our full solution ideas into a top five solutions to move to low fidelity prototyping next week. It was a really long process trying to decide which solutions would be better or worse for each criteria than our standard set up, and our whole team was very exhausted after discussing this for hours, but it was a very important step to understanding which solutions were best to move forward with. Part of what made this process so difficult was that we all had slightly different solutions pictured in our minds based on our verbal descriptions of the solutions we’d formed from components. It was difficult trying to communicate exactly what each of us was picturing, which is why I’m excited to move into low fidelity prototyping. Low fidelity prototyping will allow us to build our imagined solutions using the most basic materials and therefore be able to communicate our design ideas visually, which I feel will be really effective to clarifying our different perceptions of the five proposed solutions we’re moving forward with.

A really nice break from this intense discussion of narrowing down brainstormed ideas was a one-on-one meeting with one of the internship supervisors, Dr. Taylor. She made it an option for any interns who wanted to schedule 20 minute meetings with her to discuss hopes for the internship and future plans. It was amazing getting to talk to her and having her encourage all of my social justice and policy ambitions and global health interests. She’s very genuinely kind and encouraging and I know that I and all of my teammates were very much grateful for these one-on-one opportunities and all the efforts she makes to build relationships. Another shoutout for the week goes to Emily Mitaro, who met with our team to establish weekly check-ins as we tackle a project related to such a heavy and potentially traumatic topic. We talked about meeting weekly as a team to discuss any issues which might arise, accountability for taking breaks more, and making sure there’s a safe space for all team members. This made me feel really cared for at the internship and had a really positive impact on my mental health. Despite some struggles this week in communicating and narrowing down project ideas, overall it has been a really positive experience at the internship and with my whole team so far.