Adam Little @ CIID

2D foam-core prototype for testing joints and mechanics.

Keep reading to see more videos documenting or various prototypes…

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My bookmarks from the past week:

• Technology for Emerging Markets - Microsoft Research
  “The Technology for Emerging Markets Group seeks to address the needs and aspirations of people who are increasingly able to afford computing technologies and services.”
• MAKE: Blog: HOW TO - display RSS feeds with Arduino
• Seed: Nepal: Laptop School
  “Saving a generation of young students with creative thinking, an entrepreneurial spirit, and a little green computer.”
• Amazon.com: Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services: Kim Goodwin, Alan Cooper: Books
  “Designing successful products and services in the digital age requires a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in interaction design, visual design, industrial design, and other disciplines.”
• I Am Here: One Man’s Experiment With the Location-Aware Lifestyle
  “And that’s when it hit me: I had gained better location awareness but was losing my sense of place. “
• Design Versus Innovation: The Cranbrook / IIT Debate
  “Twenty years ago a seminal article appeared in ID magazine that contrasted two approaches to design and design education… These two separate methods evolved into what are today simply known as “innovation” (or “design thinking”) and “design,” and each has built its own culture within the design profession. Yet some confusion surrounds these concepts, especially about how these two methods interact to deliver products. “
• Cory Doctorow: One Laptop Per Child - what went wrong? | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Laptops, not mobile phones, are the means to liberate the developing world
• wanderingjefe - Blogging about my travels and work in Cambodia: January - April 2008.
  Jefe Chapin, an IDEO designer, will blog about his three month sabbatical in Cambodia where he will design and develop a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings.

Current prototype assembled from laser cut acrylic

The big task of last week was moving from the foam-core prototype to one made out of acrylic so that we can begin attaching the motor and other electronics. The version pictured above was drafted with AutoCAD and cut on the laser printer. It contains no gears but demonstrates how all the joints will work.

As someone whose background is in digital media, it has been a lot of fun watching Sid and Eilidh (both product designers) build stuff with their hands (and the laser cutter). This is a process I will be careful to never underestimate in any future projects.

Sid attaching the stepper motor

Once we were happy with the way the scale moved, we had to begin thinking about how to attach the motor. We considered using a belt system, but once we discovered a discarded printer in the school’s dumpster, we began experimenting with the gears inside that. In the end we decided to attach a gear taken from the printer to the scale and laser cut a smaller gear that would attach directly to our motor.

At this point, Sid has found a new best friend in the laser printer. We are using this tool to do everything from etching text to cutting highly customized gears. But besides using the laser printer, we have been in the electronics labs soldering wires, the wood shop seeking advice on materials, the metal workshop cutting screws, the glass studio sand blasting acrylic and in the IT office seeking discarded printers to hack.

Eilidh soldering a power supply to the motor's driver board

The problem we are currently facing is power. Once the motor was fixed to the scale and connected to our Arduino board, we were very relieved to see that it was actually working. The gears fit and the motor moved the arms quite smoothly. But the problem was it could hardly lift a plastic dish, let alone anything that would be placed in that dish. We experimented with stronger power supplies but in the end the problem appeared to be with our motor’s driver board. We are presently working with Vinay to assemble a driver board capable of handling more power. Hopefully then the scale will actually be able to move with things placed on top of it.

Driving the motor with the Arduino

Besides the motor, we also connected two limit switches. They are placed below the gears and act as a safety mechanism. Once the arm goes too far to either side, it will hit the switch and turn the motor off. They will also be necessary for measuring the amount of steps the motor will take to move the scale from one side to the other. With this measurement, we can begin thinking about how to calculate the movements that will take place when different food items and weights are placed on the scale.

We have made some good progress during the past week but our to-do-list is still frightengly long (and getting longer). Once the motor is working properly, we will need to attach an RFID reader to one arm and a load cell (weight sensor) to the other. And then we have to program everything. It also might be good if the object looks nice, as opposed to clear acrylic with wires everywhere. And then we have to put together a presentation.

From Fast Company’s article Ten Jobs You Didn’t Know You Wanted comes a nice description of the Interaction Designer — one of the 10 jobs you didn’t know you wanted!

Interaction designers work at all stages of product development to design innovative and user-friendly products. In addition to wearing the traditional hat of a designer, they work with executives to define goals for products and systems in development. They also investigate how people actually engage with new products and systems by creating “personas,” hypothetical users with constructed life stories, to predict their reactions.

Although many interaction designers have advanced degrees in design, such a background isn’t a prerequisite, says David Fore, head of consulting services at Cooper, a pioneering interaction design firm. Fore previously worked as a reporter for industry publications — valuable experience, given that interaction designers’ research requires “the skills of a reporter and an anthropologist,” according to him.

Because interaction designers bring such a comprehensive approach to design, their relatively new field, only ten to fifteen years old, is growing in demand. As a result, entry-level designers with two years of background can expect $75,000 to $80,000 a year, with ample opportunity for an increase in salary. Beginning interaction designers usually gain experience through an apprenticeship.

In addition to the competitive salary, interaction designers enjoy the opportunity “to learn about every walk of life and industry imaginable,” says Fore. “There’s working with stock brokers, working with a golf course superintendent, an advertising creative director, working with a nurse to build infusion pumps. Everyone needs product design.”

Final concept presentation (photo by Tobias Toft)

On Friday each group presented their concepts and current prototypes to the class. We discussed the evolution of our scale and demonstrated the current prototype. The initial reaction was a lot of confusion. People saw our object as a balance for comparing two objects and not a scale used for measuring. People were also confused by the metaphor of weight and how this can be used to measure a product’s environmental impact. How can we clarify the metaphor of a scale? How can we better present the “weight” of a product in terms of environmental impact?

Studio party in honor of Ashwin's birthday

After the last group presented, we quickly got on with our Friday night.

Rissoto, Girl Scout cookies and a final meeting before Monday

Eilidh, Sid and I got together over the weekend to discuss the feedback from our presentation. We brainstormed ways we could move away from the scale metaphor, but with the course half way over, we decided it would be best to carry on.

Sid's 2D prototype demonstrating the mechanics of our scale

On Monday we moved away from the traditional balance and decided to use the form of a mechanical scale. Sid created this 2D prototype out of foam-core to demonstrate the mechanics of the arm.

Stealing parts from a digital scale

With two weeks left, it is time to begin the electronics. It is often cheaper to buy a consumer product and take it apart than it is buying a single component from an electronics distributor. In this case be bought a digital scale from Ikea so that we could use the load cell sensor.

Sid and Eilidh's 3D prototype demonstrating the mechanics

Finally we made a 3D model of the scale to better understand the mechanics, size, where to hide the electronics, motor, etc…

Photo by Jefe Chapin

I originally posted this on a blog for PEPY - a grassroots NGO in Cambodia that I spent 2 months working for.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a blog by a group of Dutch Industrial Design students documenting their work on a portable, solar powered lamp for use in rural Cambodia. As a design student and a former PEPY volunteer (which I mentioned here), I got a lot of pleasure from looking back at their notes. Besides working in partnership with a Khmer solar energy company, the students were able to conduct user research directly with Cambodia’s rural residents. It was great seeing them conduct interviews in people’s homes and ride their motorbike through pitch black villages.

Now I have another blog I would like to share and since this one is just beginning, I am looking forward to following it’s development. It is  Wandering Jefe by Jefe Chapin, an IDEO designer who is taking a three month sabbatical (or a “walkabout” as he refers to it) in Cambodia to work on a low cost latrine with International Development Enterprises (IDE). IDEO is an international design consultancy that we follow very closely at the school I attend. Several of our instructors have worked for IDEO and the company’s founder, Bill Mogridge, is credited with coining the term interaction design — my field of study.

IDE on the other hand is an international nonprofit that helps farmers in countries throughout Africa, Southern Asia and Southeast Asia. Unlike many international nonprofits, IDE says they are not interested in giving handouts but creating “profitable enterprises and value chains that deliver sustainable social and economic benefits to the rural poor.” Sounds similar to the stuff I heard at PEPY and I am especially reminded of our visit with Micky Sampson at RDIC. In Cambodia IDE have done this by developing products and services to improve agricultural productions and water sanitation.

According to Jefe’s blog, IDEO and IDE first got together to create the Human Centered Design Toolkit.  This toolkit is a guide for applying IDEO’s successful method of design to developing world contexts. The toolkit can be download for free here. Here is an excerpt from it:

It contains the elements to Human-Centered Design, a process used for decades to create new solutions for multi-national corporations. This process has created ideas such as the HeartStart defibrillator, Cleanwell natural antibacterial products, and the Blood Donor System for the Red Cross—innovations that have enhanced the lives of millions of people.

Now Human-Centered Design can help you enhance the lives of smallholder farmers. This process has been specially-adapted for organizations like yours that work with farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Human-Centered Design (HCD) will help you hear the needs of smallholder farmers in new ways, create innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind.

Jefe’s project, which he promises to document on his blog, will apply IDEO’s human-centered design process to IDE’s work in the field of water sanitation in the form of a low-cost latrine for use in rural settings. Jefe summarizes the problem in this way:

Cambodians are relatively poor. A five-person family at the national poverty level earns about 900USD per year, and rural Cambodians cite cost as the number one reason that they don’t invest in effective latrines. A lot of NGOs are working in Cambodia trying to assist the poor, and a number of these NGOs have historically given away latrines. They tend to build what is, in fact, quite a nice latrine (including an offset tank, pour-flush pan and solid walls and roof: I’ll explain latrine options in a later posting. . .) that costs about 150USD to build. This has caused two problems. First, this latrine is now seen as the ‘ideal’, and people don’t want to build anything lesser. Yet they can’t save up enough money to build it. So, the second problem . . . they wait and see if an NGO will just build them a latrine. Yet, the NGOs can only reach a very small segment of the population so very few get built (of the latrines existing in Cambodia, only 17% of them are provided by NGOS. . . the rest are purchased by the users).

More background information about the problems of sanitation, the need for affordable and desirable latrines and how they propose to do this are already on Jefe’s blog. I hope that he continues to update it with photos, videos, observations and notes in the same way that the Dutch students did. And given that Jefe is an experienced designer from IDEO, it should be a great read. I wish him luck!

http://www.wanderingjefe.blogspot.com/