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

Wow – it’s only been two weeks and I’ve already learned about and experienced so many aspects of the engineering design process! It’s astonishing that I’m already a third of the way to the end of the internship, and it’s been a whirlwind so far. We’ve accomplished so much….

And we’ve also had more than a few moments of frustration. We met with our client for the second time, finalized our design criteria, decomposed our project into components, compared and ranked our design objectives by importance, and we were finally ready to brainstorm and narrow down our options to the 1-2 ideas we would prototype. After several productive brainstorming sessions (and 74 sticky notes and a bunch of diagrams drawn on whiteboards and tables), we were really struggling to objectively evaluate our ideas. How were we supposed to compare our ideas if we didn’t even have a standard?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All of the other teams this summer are iterating on existing projects, but we’re starting something from scratch. What were we supposed to use as a reference for comparison? LUCIA? And even more concerning, our design objectives are so dependent on user feedback (since it’s a training model) that it’s difficult to rank our ideas without having prototypes to work with.

After 4 hours of painstakingly trying to narrow down our list of potential things to prototype (2 hours of which were spent arguing about whether we wanted the model to rotate by flipping, twisting, or swiveling), we decided to make low-fidelity (really crude) prototypes of 4-5 different options as opposed to 1 or 2, and then narrow down from there:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You’d think this would help us, right? Well… turns out that all of our prototypes were pretty equally functional! Though that’s definitely a good place to be in, we were really unsure how to move forward with a specific prototype. Eventually, we decided we’ll meet again with our client, show her our prototypes, and discuss her preferences.

Another update: we got the CAD designs for labia from the LUCIA project and 3D-printed a scaled-down version of the mold so that we can experiment with silicone rubbers and Dragon Skin for both the labia and hymenal tissue this week and next week! While we’re waiting to figure out how, when, and where to procure materials to experiment with for mimicking skin tissue, we’ll be working on making better prototypes of the base and frame of the model, and polishing the rotation mechanism.

 

 

If this past week has taught me anything, it’s about how important it is to slow down and really take the time to evaluate your design options before moving forward with building and prototyping. The leap between brainstorming and choosing solutions to prototype is an incredibly important step in the design process. And, sometimes, maybe you just need to ask the end user whether it’s best to flip, twist, or swivel.

-Shivani