With all the Olympic hype, it’s tempting to watch the competitions all day and never do any work. But we, ourselves, are going for our own version of gold: meeting our end of semester project goals. For DialOasis, that means beginning small-scale manufacturing and kicking off the pilot study. For our allergy design project, the goal is to have a final concept and low fidelity prototype by May. Below is what my team and I have been up to these past few weeks.
DialOasis
Sprint Kick off Planning
Last week I finally led my first sprint. Building off of the outcome of Siri’s sprint where we modified the tarp wall and sink designs based off of experiences rapidly prototyping these components, we had to figure out how to communicate these new designs to Invenio. Therefore, the week was full of SolidWorks modeling and building plan drafting. It was not the most fun work. It was certainly not prototyping. But it had to be done. I’m glad that we had Callie and Tasha to help us. My goals were perhaps overly ambitious, but we all hunkered down and got the work done. Now we can hopefully ease up on the redesign and manufacturing and turn to pilot study logistics.
Design Project
My design project with Callie and Josh has been making progress. It sometimes seems on the backburner with sprints as the centerpiece of the semester, but we are moving along. We met with a renowned allergist at Texas Children’s last week and gained a lot of insight into the patient/allergist relationship and steps in the cycle of care for a food allergy patient. We have also been trying to broaden our focus. Our project originally focused on a food allergen detector device. After some technology and IP searches, we realized that we might not want to limit ourselves to that space. Therefore, lately we have done a lot of brainstorming of solutions at various timepoints in the patient cycle of care. We’ve definitely used a ton of sticky notes to organize our ideas. Between brainstorming sessions and sprint kickoffs, at this point the number of sticky note pads we go through has become something of a badge of honor, marking how much work we’ve accomplished this semester.
While the past few weeks in GMI have been relatively calm, there is a lot looking forward. On Sunday, a number of us GMIers leave for a Bay Area networking trip and, at some point this semester, Siri and I will be traveling to Costa Rica to hopefully kick off DialOasis manufacturing. This past month has been a lot of unglamorous work, but like in the Olympics, 99% of the work is done behind the scenes for a few seconds of glory. It’s also in this day-to-day work that one learns the most.