Week 4 began on a high note with anticipation for the long-awaited fun brainstorming step. This is the fourth step in the overall Engineering Design Process when we focus on generating as many ideas as possible. For this process teamwork and communication are very essential to ensure that the various solutions fully encapsulate the entire problem space. 

At the beginning of the week we worked on decomposing the problem into smaller design blocks by function. This allowed us to later on brainstorm full ideas of the station and also individual components that would makeup the station. Later in the week we started the actual  brainstorming with emphasis on quality over quantity of ideas; criticism of ideas was discouraged during early brainstorming. This helped the team to think freely without anxiety or fear of one’s ideas being rejected. The first round was more of individual work, then after that we brainstormed together and piggy-backed on one another’s ideas to come up with more refined ones.  The process of doing conceptual sketches of the station and iterating on the thought process to improve the ideas was very fulfilling. 

However, while we were doing brainstorming we did not stop the progress on the other steps that preceded it. We continued working on more in depth research on the power and electronics of the station. More specifically on how much power the station would ideally draw and how to protect it from power surges and short circuiting. We have also been conducting more interviews with various stakeholders so that they can help us with explaining the situation in low-resource Malawi.

We also started evaluating the solution ideas using Pugh screening and scoring matrices. This allowed us to narrow down to four final solutions that we will move forward with to low-fidelity prototyping. Thus Week 5 will be for prototyping. Can’t wait!