*Content warning: My project deals with pediatric sexual abuse. Please exercise self-care while reading.

For Team PIPER, this past week was a total immersion into iterative design – filled with tweaks and modifications to different components of our model, over and over again. It’s really interesting to me that even when part of a design feels perfect in your head, or even works as an individual component, it may not necessarily work the best with the whole design or work at all in real life.

We began the week really ambitiously, with a detailed plan for what we wanted to accomplish and the hope of getting some inspiration for ways we could attach our labia and hymen to the model base by browsing Lowe’s. Long story short, our trip to Lowe’s was quite unsuccessful and we realized we would need to reconsider our entire set of ideas for attachment mechanisms.

After a conversation with Grant Belton, Chief Designer at Rice 360⁰, and a trip to the Rice 360⁰ office at Bioscience Research Collaborative to see a diabetic foot ulcer model, we developed a totally new design for what would go on our rod in the swiveling model. The basic concept? A mason jar! With this design, we’d be able to just set any given labia/hymen into a cylinder that’s permanently attached to the rod, and then screw on a separate cap to secure it in place.

After several iterations in CAD and a couple of 3D-prints that introduced some more room for improvement, we produced a functioning component!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for our progress on the actual labia and hymen itself, after a client meeting we decided to pivot away from increasing the surface area on the sides of the labia and stay with our initial circular design. We got some more confirmation of this move, and a confirmation that Ecoflex 30 is the most realistic material for the labia and hymen, from Dr. Kathleen Schmeler, a gynecologist at MD Anderson who so generously met with us and gave us some excellent feedback on our materials.

Dr. Schmeler also brought up an incredibly important point – all of the labia we showed her were pigmented a light skin tone, since that was the silicone pigment most readily available to us. But where was the representation of a variety of skin tones? She emphasized the importance of including darker pigmentation in our design, and we immediately heeded her advice and ordered some darker pigmentation. We’re now hoping to produce three labia/hymen sets, each with a different skin color. It’s incredibly important, especially in training resources, to include visuals of a diversity of skin tones to provide clinical providers with a realistic representation of the populations they will be working with.

This past week, despite being only three days long (we had two days off for the 4th of July!), was filled with design modifications, pivots, and iterations. In the coming week, Team PIPER will be doing more of exactly that – iterating on our rotation system, our attachment mechanism, and combining that with some benchtop testing to see if we can reach some of our design objectives. We will also be working more heavily with prototyping different hymen variations, which will require making separate molds and curing silicone samples. Hopefully, this week we will finally put together a higher-fidelity, integrated model that works, and do some preparation for our final showcase and presentation next week!

-Shivani