Category: Blog

How can we design a safe dining experience for students with allergies?

Project Focus

User Research • Service/Experience Design • Prod­uct Design

Project Overview

[2133], the EDI ‘17 cohort, part­nered with Dr. Ruchi Gup­ta and her lab to research food aller­gy aware­ness on campuses.

With­in that scope, our team of 3 devel­oped a phys­i­cal pro­to­type to reduce cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion in sal­ad bars. This process entailed ini­tial for­ma­tive user inter­views to define a design direc­tion, ideat­ing upon that design direc­tion and final­ly con­vert­ing that direc­tion to a phys­i­cal design.

A full detail of the work we did as a part of Spot­light can be found here. 

Personal Responsibilities

Ini­tial­ly I was respon­si­ble for lead­ing user inter­views. Once our team devel­oped insights from those user inter­views, I devel­oped the below frame­works to bet­ter visu­al­ize and under­stand those insights. Final­ly, I pro­to­typed the final design that was pre­sent­ed to Dr. Gup­ta and her team.

After ini­tial user inter­views, we found an oppor­tu­ni­ty with­in din­ing halls. Specif­i­cal­ly that stu­dents with aller­gies often have to com­pro­mise between safe­ty and food vari­ety at din­ing halls.

With­in that scope, we iden­ti­fied sal­ad bars as an oppor­tu­ni­ty space, since major­i­ty of issues can be solved by elim­i­nat­ing cross-contamination

In order to under­stand where our team could make an impact we mapped out the dif­fer­ent points cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion could occur. We iden­ti­fied a pain point at the end of the con­sump­tion chain when stu­dents use sal­ad bars.

Based on our insights we devel­oped design direc­tion of elim­i­na­tion, not mit­i­ga­tion. This drew from the Japan­ese man­u­fac­tur­ing phi­los­o­phy of PokaYoke — where the process elim­i­nates makes mis­takes, such as cross-con­t­a­m­i­na­tion impossible.

To fur­ther flesh out our design direc­tion, we cre­at­ed a low fideli­ty pro­to­type to visu­al­ize the design con­straints an aller­gy safe sal­ad dis­penser would need to meet — name­ly zero-con­tact dis­pens­ing, a mod­u­lar replace­ment mech­a­nism and an air-tight lid.

Finally, we presented our work to Dr. Ruchi Gupta and her lab in which we outlined a list of design constraints salad bars should employ in order to instill confidence in students with food allergies

How can we injection mold a toy based on a 4th grader’s sketch?

Skills

Injec­tion Mold­ing • CNC • Design for Manufacutirng/Assembly • CAD Modeling

Project Overview:

           This project is cur­rent­ly in progress. I, along with 3 oth­er stu­dents, are work­ing design­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing a child’s toy from a 4th graders sketch. This ini­tial­ly entailed mod­el­ing the part. From there we cre­at­ed a CNC pro­gram via Nx to machine out the molds. We are cur­rent­ly machin­ing out the molds to be injec­tion molded. 

Personal Responsibilities:

            My main respon­si­bil­i­ty was a sub­assem­bly of the final part – this entails mod­el­ing the part and design­ing the cor­re­spond­ing mold tak­ing account DFMA principles.

Project

Process

The project start­ed with this beau­ti­ful sketch by Anna, Key­on and Mack — three 4th graders at a local ele­men­tary school.

Based on their draw­ing, we mod­eled the above cup­cake. It has three dis­tinct parts — the can­dle, the frost­ing & the base.

Before mod­el­ing the molds, we 3‑D print­ed our part to visu­al­ize and ver­i­fy it.

After ver­i­fy­ing out CAD mod­els CNC molds were created.

Final­ly the parts were injec­tion molded

How can we design an interaction to prepare patients for Post Operative Cognitive Dysfunction?

Project Focus

User Research  • Inter­ac­tion Design • Ser­vice Design

Project Overview

This past Fall I par­tic­i­pat­ed in IDI’s (Inte­grat­ed Design Inno­va­tion) 24-hour design chal­lenge. IDI is a col­lec­tive of design stu­dents from North­west­ern, MIT, Carnegie Mel­lon, and UPenn. Over 24 hours I, and a group of 4 oth­er stu­dents, were tasked with design­ing a solu­tion to pre­pare post-surgery patients to the threat of Post Oper­a­tive Cog­ni­tive  Dys­func­tion (POCD). Based on the research our team pro­posed Doc Dougie, a chat­bot that pro­vides care­givers the nec­es­sary tools to rec­og­nize POCD. 

Skills Used

The main focus of the com­pe­ti­tion was design research and inter­ac­tion design. The inter­ac­tion design went through two quick iter­a­tions from a paper-pro­to­type to the looks-like pro­to­type show­cased in this video. The design research entailed user inter­views, envi­ron­ment walk­throughs and sec­ondary research.

Process

Though the com­pe­ti­tion was short (24 hours), teams went through all the steps of the design process.

Ini­tial­ly our team scoured sec­ondary resources to real­ly under­stand POCD. Once we devel­oped a bet­ter back­ground in regards POCD, we inter­viewed patients, care­givers and med­ical pro­fes­sion­als to get a deep­er, con­tex­tu­al under­stand­ing of the prob­lems POCD patients face. Hav­ing gained a bet­ter under­stand­ing of those issues, we did lit­er­al walk through of the out-patient process to under­stand the dif­fer­ent user touchpoints.

Syn­the­siz­ing our research we devel­oped a basic paper pro­to­type (below) to illus­trate the type of inter­ac­tion we want­ed to user to have.

Final­ly, we fleshed out that pro­to­type via the below chat­bot, as illus­trat­ed by the video below.

Overall, Doc Dougie provides an interface that gives caregivers the instant, personal feedback and assurance they need when taking care of their loved ones