Another week is drawing to a close and this one has been busy with surprisingly little headway. Last Thursday we were in the heart of research. Friday was basically a continuation of that. Shout out to Xiaoyao for  teaching the group how to use the table of contents feature in google doc. Maybe it is a lame thing to get excited about but we had an awesomely organized research document thanks to her. On Monday we presented to all of SEED on the progress of our research. It took more than 2 hours for 3 groups to go but we all were informed of any gaps in our work and spent the remainder of the day fixing them. It was surprisingly rewarding because we had done a decent job in gathering background information. Mostly what we lacked were analogous solutions which we were able to quickly come up with. We investigated an interesting device in the machine shop called the flex-o-post. It is this super flexible device that holds digital displays and tools while people work in the shop. Joe, the machinist, was able to explain how it worked and it helped all of our members come up with some new ideas.

Tuesday we developed design criteria. This was interesting because we managed to have a shockingly contentious debated over whether the humerus and scapula needed to have a connection point in the form of a joint or if, as long as everything moved properly, it didn’t matter. Ultimately we settled on not including it but getting there took some doing. By the end of the morning we had our criteria at least. Interestingly enough Easy to Understand ended up as our top criterion. This is probably because we made an attempt to fit anatomical accuracy, user friendly appearance and accurate motion all in one criterion which is probably why it was so difficult to write. Fortunately, we had recorded our client interview so over the course of defining our criteria we were able to frequently refer back to the interview. In the afternoon we had a Solidworks tutorial that was quite enjoyable. This was not my first time working with the software, but I had never learned how to define relations between two lines so it was a useful and new experience. The end of the day was spent establishing design blocks and creating a Gantt chart we have long since abandoned. One of the very interesting aspects of SEED is that everything gets the appropriate amount of time for what it would take. Instead of spending one day on screening and scoring like we expected it is looking like it is goimg to take much longer. Caz told us his group spent an entire 3 days on the process so I am hoping ours will go a little faster.

Wednesday was the day of brainstorming. We made brief improvements to our design criteria based on feedback

from Dr. Wettergreen and then we led the morning off with a 45 minute round of individual brainstorming. We used the writing slip method and managed to list well over a hundred ideas based on the design blocks we came up with. Unfortunately many of the ideas had common elements. It took most of the day to go through all the ideas but it led to a whole slew of new ideas being generated. Unfortunately we also encountered a problem. That afternoon we tried to morph and realized that we all are quite turned around on how to combine the various ideas we had into feasible solutions. We debated ideas all afternoon and barley got anywhere. One thing that did come up was that Rebeca was rather lost on the adjectives we were using. We use the last 30 minutes of the day developing a common glossary that she could refer to so that the whole team could be on the same page. It definitely felt like the most important thing we accomplished that day. Thursday morning Dr. Hunter tried to help us make some progress and got us moving in a direction. She talked with us for nearly 2 hours and kind of got us going in the right direction but we will see. The big thing we keep getting caught up on is how much detail we need to lay out for each idea before deciding if it is effective. The standard morphing and brainstorming does not seem to be working but perhaps it is just today’s frustration. This week has been exhausting but hopefully we will soon have our design plan narrowed down for good.

 

P.S. Sorry for having fewer pictures in this one. I will try to get more in the future.