This week at SEED, our team began by wrestling with the meaning of humanity, and ended with an inhuman, haunting creation.

After morphing solutions last week, on Monday, we finally reached the most popular and invigorating part of the engineering design process: Pugh Screening and Pugh Scoring. We all knew the legend of Caz’s team, who spent 3 days screening and scoring over a hundred components/solutions. Luckily for us, we only had 16 solutions to consider. However, we had two criteria, easy to understand and feasibility, that were extremely difficult to evaluate solutions against. Take easy to understand for example. Once we choose and make our solution, we made an easy to understand scale that can be used to survey users. But while choosing solutions, how can we determine how easy to understand a solution would be? For a solution to be easy to understand, it should move naturally and appear somewhat human-like. Though Pugh Screening went smoothly, Pugh Scoring was a different story. Our task was to create a 5-point scale to quantify the humanity of different mechanisms. We decided that was a task to save until after lunch.

Monday afternoon was a struggle to come up with our 5-point scales. Eventually, we decided to score the easy to understand and feasibility criteria based on the number of positive attributes a solution had (i.e. few exposed mechanisms, anatomical accuracy). Our other criteria, durability and cost, were a bit more straightforward to evaluate. With our scales created, we drew out our scoring matrix … and it was a success!! After all the calculations, we ended up with two possible solutions that scored significantly higher than the rest. We moved both of them onto the prototyping stage, because due to the nature of our project, we’ll have to perform a lot of iterative prototyping anyways, to see exactly which mechanisms work.

With our two possible mechanisms chosen, we spent most of Tuesday preparing our presentation. At Rebeca’s suggestion, we temporarily moved our team base to the OEDK basement lounge, which was way comfier with its blankets and pillows. The presentation itself went well. Everyone in my team did a great job with their parts, and I gained a much better understanding of the other teams’ projects too, after listening to their presentations. We spent the rest of the afternoon ordering prototyping materials and researching infant dimensions, to better understand the correct size and scale of our shoulder model. Tuesday ended with a popcorn break, like the best kind of days should end. Grant vowed to master the popcorn machine by the end of the summer, and I am totally confident in his ability to do so.

Wednesday was the 4th of July, which meant a day off from work and a SEED Independence day cookout at Martel! I woke up to a heavy rainstorm and a flood (typical Houston, I guess), but the rain couldn’t wash away our plans. By late afternoon, the weather had cleared up. After some misadventures with the grill and failed attempts to light the charcoal, we finally treated ourselves to some authentic American hamburgers and hotdogs. At 9 PM, we climbed up to the Martel balcony to watch the fireworks from Hermann Park. I had a blast. I hope that the Brazilians enjoyed their first 4th of July, and the unabashed display of American spirit and patriotism. Huge shoutout to our socials, Julia C and Arisa, for planning everything!

My team returned to the OEDK on Thursday and were soon faced with a sobering truth. Before, we found a neat book called The Measure of Man and Woman, which had a bunch of drawings of babies and adults with labeled sizes and dimensions. We printed out a to-scale picture of a baby to reference when building our model (it’s displayed on our team whiteboard now), and researched some more on infant bone dimensions. Turns out, a baby’s scapula is only 7 cm tall and 5 cm wide. Attaching anything to a scapula that size will be quite the challenge….

We also finished our low-fidelity prototypes.

Sammi gave a laser cutting workshop in the afternoon. I had never laser cut before, and was happy to play around with Adobe Illustrator for a few hours. Anna refined the appearance of Scale Baby in Illustrator. Though I’m impressed by her mad Illustrator skills, that thing she created will one day crawl into my dreams.

On Friday, I got to see the laser cutter in action for the first time! We laser cut two scapulas, a box (to model a trunk), and a slip disk (a stack of wooden disks that can rotate like a ball bearing). We realized that the dimensions of our box were too large, and plan to laser cut a new box next week. During SEED lunch, our socials came through again and ordered us pizza from Dominos. We had an interesting conversation that covered white powders, the Great Salt Lake, and happiness. After that, my team spent the rest of Friday experimenting with the 3D printer. We printed a small, working hinge and a humerus that looks like a chicken bone. We’ll definitely have to change that. Next week, we continue prototyping! Until then.