Week 12 is the design audit for all the groups. This is where teams act as auditors of another teams in the class. Each group will provide an overviews (both visual and verbal) of their current designs of their projects. The auditing team will actively listen and then ask a series of questions regarding the feasibility, functionality and design of the other teams design. Questions commonly asked at the design audit are shown below:

1. Why did your team choose this particular design?
2. What issues is your team trying to resolve?
3. How will the various parts of this design be fabricated?
4. How will you test your team’s design?

These questions are design to spark conversations regarding design and functionality of the product. Speaking to other teams fosters a collaborative creative thinking space which allows the group being audited to see a view point which is unbiased. This encourages the DIWO, “do-it-with-others” maker mindset.  This gives the mentality that the people around have diverse experience and can be possibly the missing piece to the puzzle. Having an unbiased team audit the design and functionality of another team could raise possible concerns, limitations and improvements to the group’s design which the group being audited had never thought about. Each team learned so much from others and we were able to help each other perfect our designs and solve issues and flaws in our designs. Below are summaries of what each team learned as well as images of them in a design audit.

XNihilo & BCC Creations

XNihilo (Ana, Anjali, Yuanzhen “Ben”) – H2Go, the hydration wristband

Feedback: Make the red light blink and then stay red so that the user can still tell that they are dehydrated. Possibly look into vibrations along with light signals or variations of the product in which it can be used as an attachment to a water bottle or just a band for people without a FitBit

“A quick recap of what we did during the past weeks: we are designing a dehydration band to remind the users to drink water. In the last week, we have successfully tested our customized sensor on the regular Arduino and we also generated a hand-made circuit.” – Yuanzhen “Ben”

 

“According to me, the feedback allowed the groups to get a different perspective on their products. It also gave a sense of how the users would want to change the product and what would benefit them more. We will definitely incorporate the feedback we received and hope to make the product that can be used by everyone.” – Anjali

BCC Creations – Brian K., Charlene, Carter – Home Security

Feedback: Think about possibility of having pets in the home and how that would affect product; looking into a reminder to set a home alarm before leaving the house because people may be in a rush to leave and may forget to set the alarm; look at making product more discrete.

“The feedback allowed our group to think about our product from a different perspective, and to also consider situations that we had not though of when we originally came up with the idea.” – Carter

 

 

AquaPonics & Supra

AquaPonics – Kenny, Ian & John – Fishtank Aquaponics Self Sustaining Garden

Feedback: Make modules for the garden larger for root growth

“This actually gave us some great insight and the feedback that they provided will prove invaluable in the next couple weeks as we are finishing up our project.” – John

Supra – Olivia, Ben, Veronika – Doorstop

Feedback: Create a much stronger structural base; Minimize the vibration the stopping component the doorstopper experienced; Utilization of either a stronger adhesive or multiple command strips on our prototype base.

“As Marty Cagan testifies in Silicon Valley Product Group’s Prototype Testing, “testing your ideas with real users is probably the single most important activity” in the prototyping process: and I honestly couldn’t agree more.” –Ben

 

 

The MakerLax & JJJ Inc.

The MakerLAX – Peter, Chase, Brian X. – Tie Helper

Feedback: Add some physical grooves to the tie helper not only to make it more flexible, but as a method to make it easier for the user to determine where each end of the tie may go; Look into resizing the design and maybe changing the thickness.

“This was different from our usual group sharing in that we actually had the chance to sit down and really delve deeper into another group’s work and vice-versa. ” –Brian

JJJ Inc. – Jorge, Jai, Xinlu – Smart Light Switch

Feedback: It is somewhat bulky and maybe arduous to install and/or remove;

“Our team also made huge progress for our own project —  the Smart Light Switch. Based on our experiments in last week, we decided to use a cross-shaped arm instead of gear. We connected the arm to the motor, and connected the motor to the Arduino board. Then, we connected the bluetooth module to the Arduino board. We found a smartphone application that allows us to control the motor to rotate through bluetooth. This app saved us a lot of hassle.” – Xinlu

 

Zerott – Taofik, Odelia, Tiffany – Robot

Feedback: keep our ultrasonic transducer would be better than a button because an ultrasonic transducer would be more interactive and impressive; focus more on the internal hardware versus the outerwear.

“Many of the suggestions that both parties pointed out were important and logical. Obviously, as a team we need to take these suggestions into consideration and figure out if we will use these suggestions.” – Odelia

 

“My main take away from the design auditing process was to strive for a minimum viable product given the short timeline we have and to learn as much as we can while working on our projects.” – Taofik

 

It looks like all the teams are well on their way to presenting their wonderful creations!