Hello! Here to report on the 3rd week of my time here as a SEED intern! This week was both one of the toughest and the most rewarding weeks yet. I described this week as rewarding because of how tasking physically and mentally it was. Similar to how diamonds are formed through pressure, I believe our efforts this week shall give us a fruitful solution.

The thick of this week consisted of multiple screening, scoring tables and tests to aid us with these tables. We first started the week of by redefining the Design Criteria left to us by my team from last semester. Basically the moral of the week was data-driven justification for EVERYTHING. So to aid us with this, we ran some tests recording and comparing the thickness of our emulsion to the Kodak Standard to help us define our Thickness/Consistency design criteria. We continued to support the criterion we set with data until we had a viable Design Criteria to start screening and scoring with.

We started our screening with a common sense draft to eliminate about 10 of the 3o solutions we originally morphed to get. After a common sense we did yet another round of testing to see if the component options for our design blocks like Emulsion application and Smoothing methods were actually feasible. We then used this data to screen these component ideas for each design block against our design criteria to get 2-3 components per design block. After getting the “best” components for each design block we then had a second round of morphing to come up with seven potential solution ideas for SCORING!

 

You can never run out of data to collect, even as we were preparing our Scoring weights and scales. We went through each Design Criteria to first check if all of them were necessary in determining our solutions. After this filter we then made data-driven 5-point scales for the remaining design criteria to begin scoring. After a successful round we were able to zero in on 2 viable solutions but didn’t want to leave making a decision as big as choosing a solution to Friday afternoon at 4:50 pm and so ended our week with a plan to go over our scoring matrix with a fresh mind Monday Morning.

The thin of this week was that although we had to make it through the trials and tribulations of Screening and Scoring, we are coming very close to our final solution and that is very rewarding! Our team’s cohesion has also been on an incline as we continued to bond over our frequent outbursts of confusion and frustration. The whole SEED team also continues to foster our bond with successful potluck SEED lunches like the one we had today!

Till next week, Mathias