For those of you who laughed at me when I blogged about graduate school being mostly scissors, construction paper and glue… guess what, that’s also a large part of private Research & Development! Much like the work we completed during the medical design short course at the beginning of the summer, last week an Establishment Labs RDI group got together to brainstorm new ideas on product development. We spent a good portion of the day discussing not only the functionality of our ideas and designs, but the ease of consumer use and marketability of the products. Once we had a clear direction in mind, we set to work with our kindergarten art supplies and made some low-fidelity prototypes. My mother is a kindergarten teacher, and I don’t mean to brag or anything, but I’ve had quite a lot of practice building with pipe cleaners, so I’d like to believe we had some pretty exceptional models.
Establishment is a very cutting-edge company, and for that reason, everyone is always brainstorming about ways to innovate. There are many projects currently in the air and I’ve had the opportunity to work on multiple (some others also requiring my construction paper and hot glue skills). During the past week, I’ve conducted more laboratory tests on various prototype ideas and have had the absolute luxury of mass data compilation and analysis. I have grown fond of properly organized and aesthetically pleasing spreadsheets, and functional Matlab code.
Para la semana seis (week #6), I’ve been tasked with taking some of the best device designs from our earlier brainstorming session and assessing the functionality of each within a clinical setting. Once my assessments are complete, I plan on refining the many designs we have to only a few highly functional designs and building the subsequent prototypes. To clarify, the word “device” elicits mental images of complex circuits and pieces of electronic equipment, but in actuality it is defined as “a thing made or adapted for a particular purpose.” We’re going for simple and cost-effective, so I don’t need to mock up complicated prototypes for difficult fields like neurosurgery (that is very much not my field of expertise). Instead, a simple piece of equipment that can be used for our intended application will suffice. My goal is to build something pseudo-functional, something I can use to convey the story of how the commercially-manufactured device will operate and demonstrate my ideas for the actual manufacturing process. As a bioengineer, my current focus is the functionality of the devices, and my prototypes will be assessed further by other engineers and marketing specialists to make sure the consumer experience is the best that it can be.
This past weekend was lower-key than our past weekendventures because weeks of 10-hour-workdays and early-morning/late-night-weekends started to add up. Even though we spent time catching up on sleep debt, I will say I am lucky to be in a cohort that remembered my birthday and wanted to celebrate accordingly. My delightful classmates and colleagues are slowly growing into full-blown acquaintances! 🙂 We spent Saturday afternoon exploring the mountains surrounding Escazú (our CR hometown), watching soccer games (after Belgium ruined my bracket by LOSING) and sunbathing with some nice books. All in all, it doesn’t sound that exciting, but every Saturday with this crew is an adventure!
View of Escazú (Slightly prettier than the group)
Blocking the scenery, but still not a bad view 😉
Solo pic in front of the view para mi madre