Our first team picture! From left to right, Alex, me, Tori and Blessings.
Hello again! As always, I am writing from the end of our third week at SEED! It seems that time has flown by here, I honestly cannot believe that we are almost at the halfway point. This summer has been very fun so far, through all of the prototyping challenges and the critical thinking needed to find the best ideas (this past week). Despite the slower times, I am very excited to continue working through the rest of the summer and see what is in store!
As alluded to above, this past week has included a lot of thinking and analyzing and going over things again. This week we’ve restarted the engineering design process for our Casting Stand project. This means brainstorming, screening and scoring our ideas to find our final solution. This is usually the most important, and honestly monotonous part of the design process. Despite this, my team has gotten almost all the way through it, and once we finish, we’ll be able to start on the fun of prototyping!
Monday began with a brainstorming session focusing on creating ideas based on discrete design components like base shape, comfort features and more. We ended up with many individual ideas and put them together into full solutions using a morphological chart, which is a tool used to combine components together into full fledged solution. We ended up making 22 solutions from this process, then proceeded to screen them to narrow down the solutions on Tuesday. However, once we reached this step in the process, we ran into some issues. All of our design ideas were basically versions of the same fundamental design, that of the prototype we were left with from the team before. This meant that trying to find the best solution from the group of them was impossible, because there is no good or bad if everything is the same, sadly enough.
Our brainstormed solutions, and our original project, an uncanny resemblance!
We ended Tuesday ready for a fresh start by beginning the process again, with brainstorming! In order to avoid the same design fixation we had on our original device, we focused our brainstorming session on different ways for a patient to support themselves, and ended up a lot more successful. We had fun ideas like hugging a pillow on a stand and an adult size baby walker!
We took a break after lunch on Wednesday for out TA to run a workshop on Solidworks (CAD) and 3D Printing! I came into this summer with very minimal experience working with CAD software, so I was very excited for this workshop. Although we only got through the basics, I feel better about working with the program, as the scariest step is always the first, one. We also got to use the 3D printers for fun, and I printed out a flexible fish! The rest of Wednesday was spent screening these ideas–successfully! We ended with nine patient support ideas, ready to flesh them out as full solutions.
This morning (Thursday) we began by getting together as a team, discussing and fully transforming our component ideas into full ideas. This took up the better part of the morning, and by lunchtime, we were ready to begin the scoring process.
Two of our full ideas!
While both the screening and scoring processes are designed to test ideas against given design criteria, scoring is more intensive and objective, meaning that it produces better, more narrowed results, but also takes a lot longer to complete. We ended today and will continue to tomorrow with making our design criteria into objective scales. Once these scales have been made, we will be able to score our solutions and finally select the design we will work on for the rest of the summer, a very exciting time! Hopefully by the next time I write, it’s to introduce our final design!
Until next week,
Liz Kacpura