This week was our busiest yet – with five interviews, brainstorming, and scoring our designs, we had plenty to work on. Speaking with Prince, our clinical mentor at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital (QECH) in Malawi, was extremely helpful in solidifying our design decisions. After he expanded on how he envisioned our device, we were able to begin exploring physical prototypes through brainstorming. 

Here is our column of partially developed designs. These can be combined in one device or act as a standalone feature in the device, but the main objective was to visualize them together and draw them out before we could forget the idea. I enjoy this kind of conceptualization because I’m a visual person.

Above is our cluster of fully developed design sketches, grouped by common features. This process pushed us to explain our ideas clearly and completely think through each design. 

Now that we’ve screened and scored each device, we’re left with a few top contenders to move into low-fidelity prototyping. I’m looking forward to getting to work with the OEDK’s low-fidelity cart materials, and potentially even some hand tools. It will be cool to see our designs come to life, as ambitious as our ideas might seem on paper (or Post-It). 

Aside from prototyping, we have one more meeting lined up for next week to discuss user-interface design. We’ve already had some interesting ideas regarding an LED light display to indicate charging and sanitizing progress, among others, so it will be nice to hear feedback on those. 

Thanks for following along so far, and keep an eye out for more prototype updates next week!