Hi everyone! We were able to make a lot of progress in our background research and informational interviews this week, which will be very helpful moving forward into brainstorming and prototyping. With the information from our interviews, we revised our initial list of design criteria and began thinking about how to set measurable goals for our prototype at the showcase. In line with our own motivations and with the request of our clients, we are ultimately aiming to create a conceptual prototype that will supplement the research deliverables we are developing. This will focus largely on form, and could potentially involve multiple prototypes. I’m glad that we have some additional clarity on what our final project will look like, since at first we were unsure whether we wanted to focus more on the research aspect of the problem.
Along with refining our design criteria, we also completed our spreadsheet for NEST Bundle device specs, which organizes all the project-relevant information for each device in the bundle. We also created our benchmarking spreadsheet per Abby’s example (thank you Abby!) and organized each device into Charging, Sanitizing and Storing categories. Most excitingly, we continued brainstorming and sketching initial ideas and discussing design alternatives. Although we’re still in the very early stages of picturing what our device might look like, it’s been interesting to discuss certain features with the team. Examples of proposed components include removable or interchangeable cords, multiple USB ports per compartment, dividers or adjustable sections within the device, and a glass cover that will protect users from UVC light but also allow them visibility into the container. More to come on these features!
Next week, we’ll have meetings with various Rice and Rice360-affiliated professionals, which is exciting. We will also be meeting Prince, a nurse in Malawi who advises many Rice360 and NEST360 projects. His clinical experience is extremely valuable, and I’m looking forward to applying it to our design sketches to create a more intuitive and useful device.
As another update, the low-fidelity prototype workshop from this week was as fun as I had hoped – we got to create prototypes in teams for a mechanism that would keep an egg from cracking after being dropped. Teams that were able to protect the egg won a Coffeehouse gift card – unfortunately my team’s egg cracked, but we’ll get ‘em next time.
That’s all for now! Until next time.
