This week in class we had a wonderful guest speaker from Shapeways. She was able to give us a quick tour of their factory and then she took us through a powerpoint presentation highlighting different making tools and resources we can use to make our own products. What really stood out to me was when she said no two products are exactly the same, which is the beauty of what they do. 3D printing gives us this capability which is really special.

For the rest of class we were given the opportunity to come up with an initial sketch of what we want our product to look like and make prototypes. My group is creating an assistant for pour over coffee to eliminate the need for the human to slowly pour the water over the coffee grinds. We struggled in the beginning when deciding how we wanted to make sure the product could fit over any type of glass. We came to the conclusion to make the legs of the product adjustable so it can be raised or lowered depending on the size of the cup. Next, we needed to address the fact that some people like their coffee very black, while others like it not as strong. So, we decided to develop ‘slides’ that can be inserted or removed that have different amounts of holes on them so the water can drip at the desired speed creating lighter or darker coffee. We also decided to make the product two parts. The top part is the water reservoir and the bottom is where the coffee grinds are located. I will be working on the bottom half while Ernest and Roger will work on developing the top of the product. We plan to use a thin aluminum inside so the water does not touch any materials that could leak toxins into the water. Additionally, the material we use in the MakerLab does not work well with water over long periods of time, especially hot water which is another reason we will be using a different material on the inside. I am looking forward to seeing this product come together and hopefully by the end of the semester we can use it ourselves.

Linked are the photos of our sketches we made during class.

In the assigned readings and videos we had for this week, my favorite was the video about prototyping the mouse for Microsoft and Google. It was really fascinating to me to see all of the different designs the attempted to use. What struck me was that the mouse David Kelley thought was the best did not resonate well with the users. This shows how important it is to get feedback from the consumers who will actually be using the product, because if they do not like it, it will not be successful. I also never realized how many iterations objects go through to make the final product perfect.