Author: rac4gh
The Final Projects
After getting a rude awakening about how hard videos were to make, I feel that at the end of the day our group and all the other groups did a nice job getting their videos. What I found very interesting was how all the different groups created their videos using a bunch of different stylistic approaches. I thought it was very cool how one group used a person to be the face of their project while other groups would use a whiteboard to go over how their device was supposed to function. I felt that the white board approach was very effective because not only did it convey lots of information in a small amount of time but it allowed for visuals and voice overs to be used simultaneously. On the flip side, the videos using simply the person talking about their project was also good but it did not convey the same amount of information to the viewer that the whiteboard approach did. Another aspect of our final project videos that I thought was very interesting was how one group in particular used videos from other websites in their project. This made their project video look much more professional as well as give more detail about the functionalities of the body that they were focusing on. I personally was unaware that we were able to use videos from other websites such as youtube and would have loved to put some of those in our presentation had I known. At the end of the day though, I think that everybody worked incredibly hard on these presentations and they all turned out very well. Nice job everybody.
Parting Thoughts
When I first started in this class I thought “how hard can it be to design something”, only to find out that I was looking at this all wrong. I was completely focused on the final design of a device, rather than trying to figure out the niche that the device needed to fill and the “need” that it had to fix. Going into the class I had the mind set of going straight from noticing an issue, to developing something that would fix the problem. As the class went on, I came to realize that the initial issue is usually not the problem but if you dig a bit deeper and interview some people, then you can figure out the bigger issue driving the smaller problems that you originally noticed. It may have taken me a few personal health projects to figure out what exactly the teachers were looking for, but I eventually got it. If I had any advice about the personal health projects, it is that the class was so focused on the process of design that during the early parts of the class the message that the students were supposed to actually invent some device to help with their partner’s goal, got lost in translation. I had originally thought that creating a method for my partner to follow would be the answer to the problem. While my method of having my partner log her calories for her calorie intake goal did work, it was not exactly what the teachers were looking for. In the end I felt that the class was very helpful and gave me great insight into the world of design. It turns out, while the class may have seemed relaxed and maybe even unorganized at times, it was actually artfully structured and designed that way for a purpose, to allow the students to connect the dots rather than telling them how to. Thank you all for a wonderful semester.
The Making of a Movie
When David first mentioned that we were going to be making a movie for our final project, my original thought was “well, how hard could it be”… very hard. It did not occur to me until after we began working on the project for a couple weeks, how much work goes into the making of any kind of movie. I figured that we would get a general idea of what we would be filming and just “wing it”, again dead wrong. We ended up spending more time working on our story board that we did actually filming. Emily, having plenty of experience on the matter, was adamant that we be thorough on our story board despite my more laid back approach on the matter. Emily could not have been more right. The further into filming we got, the more apparent it became that filming had to be meticulously planned and that the “winging it” stately would have extended the filming process significantly. Had we simply shot the film as we went then we would have needed to meet on multiple different occasions and shot the movie scene by scene as opposed to doing almost all of the filing in one sitting and putting it together later. This is not to say that the relaxed strategy would not have worked, it just would have taken significantly longer. If it were not for Emily, our group would still be stressing out over filming rather than focusing on the details of our project and editing.
PHP Projects
When first starting out on our Personal-Health-Projects, Katherine and I figured we needed to find a way to get quantitative data that would help lead to a pattern to allow for an accurate analysis. We both had similar goals of going to the gym each week, but found that this structure didn’t lead to much data. It only has a few binary points: either you went to the gym or you didn’t. There were significantly more potential factors that could explain the data and not enough hard evidence, which gave us some difficulties when presenting our data and progress. In the next PHP, we need to address this error by working with a larger collection of data and finding better, more direct ways to intervene with the problem presented. Our first goals definitely showed less success than we anticipated, but our mistakes should hopefully help us figure out what to do differently for our new goals.
Reilly – Entry #1
Hey all, my name is Reilly Carlton and I just arrived at UVA last semester from Hampden-Sydney College because I am in a 3-2 program that essentially combines my undergraduate and graduate degrees. At Hampden-Sydney College I worked on my undergraduate degree in physics, and am looking forward to seeing how I can apply that knowledge to the BME world. I am also a member of the Alpha Chi Sigma professional chemistry fraternity and was a lab technician in the Hampden-Sydney biology department. I am taking this class because I am pursuing a masters degree in BME and am very interested in the innovation and design process as it applies to the Bio-Medical world.
BME Design 