Low fidelity Prototyping:
After a few weeks of brainstorming leading to needs assessment and definition eventually leading to less abstract design and sketching, my teammates and I finally felt as though we were ready to start making stuff! This was very exciting, we were finally living up to the title of “maker,” that everyone seems to be applying to all engineering-esque fields these days.
We got in the lab and started immediately messing around with clay, Popsicle sticks, pipe cleaners and rubber bands, pretty much any and all the supplies available to us in MR-4. Rubber band turned out to be a great way to make temporary joint connections that were easily adjustable, Pipe cleaners excelled in making shapes fit specifically to the unique curvature of the hand, and clay perfect way to add extra weight to parts of the device we wanted children to know should rest on the table during writing. We were particularly lucky to be working on a design that we could test to some extent on ourselves. Although our hands, for the most part, are much larger than a child’s (perhaps maybe not Sanaa’s…) and none of us have experienced dyspraxia, we were still able to fit the devices to the shape of our hands and assess the relative comfort of various writing positions.
The low cost of materials was also great because it allowed us to try out a almost all of the ideas we had been exploring. These mock-ups may have not been perfect or exact in any sense, but they were enormously valuable in helping else determine which of our potential designs was the most viable for further testing. It also helped us gain a better understanding of the 3-dimensional structure of each design and whether or not 3-D printing would be the right method for constructing the actual prototype. In the end we ended up deciding to pursue a design that consisted of a single plastic element that curved around the back of child’s knuckles to a weighted foot meant to glide along the paper during writing. The device would be laser cut from plastic in flat form and then heated to bend to its final shape.
BME Design 