During week 3, we made a lot of progress in our prototyping, and it was really exciting getting to be very hands-on in bringing our project to life! We started off the week by creating our top 3 solutions (narrowed down from top 5 after more team discussion) as low fidelity prototypes, as pictured. These solutions were made quickly, to demonstrate the concept with cheap and widely available materials such as popsicle sticks and cardboard. After meeting with our client, we chose a top idea to turn into a medium fidelity prototype, made out of more precise and higher quality materials. We used several different types of silicone rubbers to mold labias using a 50% scaled down version of the LUCIA labia. Grant helped us choose which silicone rubbers to buy and helped us find some in the OEDK. We used Ecoflex 10 and 30 and Dragonskin 10 to test at first, and have Dragonskin FX Pro ordered. These are all different types of silicone rubbers with varying textures and levels of elasticity. Currently, of the three we have tested, the Ecoflex 30 seems best for modeling the labia skin and tissue. We are still trying to determine best materials for the hymen.
On Thursday, Dr. Wettergreen came for a prototype evaluation and gave us advice on our model and specifically the base and attachment mechanisms we can use. On Friday, we had our midsummer presentation to present our cumulative work to peers in the internship and members of the Rice 360 internal team. This was a really great chance for our team to look back at our work so far this summer and see how far we’ve come. I was very proud looking at the medium fidelity prototype and seeing the first physical model we’ve made. Our goal is to increase that to be as high fidelity as possible by the end of the internship, but having that medium fidelity prototype on hand made me feel like we had a really strong start towards our goals. It was especially exciting seeing that first physical prototype since there’s no existing solutions similar to this out there so it felt like a really major step bringing this idea into physical existence. We also got to take cute team photos after the presentation!
For bonding this week, the TA’s hosted a catered Torchy’s dinner followed by a fun team scavenger hunt! This was a really fun event and a great way to connect with others in the internship outside my design team, since our scavenger hunt teams were randomized. Overall, this was a really great week. My team worked really hard on Friday to plan out important tasks and goals for the remainder of the internship, so I have a optimistic outlook on the rest of the internship even though we will have a lot of problems and tasks to tackle in the next few weeks.
