Collaborative Design with ASL Interpreters
The class Collaborative Design tasks my team of 5 people to do a semester-long deep dive into the world of ASL interpreters. This course taught us how to co-design an idea alongside a user group through 3 phases. In the first month, we completed around 10 user interviews with ASL interpreters to learn about the day-to-day lives, the challenges, and the joys that encompass being an interpreter. For stage 2, we iterated over 100 ideas that aimed to alleviate their pains and elevate their joys. We took 12 of these ideas to co-design we were got feedback and iterated on these ideas alongside interpreters. In the final stage, we took our best ideal, an ASL Immersion Program, and expanded on the idea using all that we had learned about interpreters and the greatest single passion, expanding access for members of the deaf community.
The Hopper Project
The hopper project was part of an introductory design class (Design Nature). The goal of this project was to gain familiarity with the design process and rapid prototyping and iteration. I focused on concepts of elastic potential energy, stress and parallel transversals. For this project, I utilized Solidworks for design, Adobe Illustrator, laser cutting, bandsaws, and hand drills for building and prototyping.
3-in-1 3D Printer Desk
During this project my friend and I designed and built a desk to hold a 3-in-1 printer that had a 3D printer, CNC router, and laser cutter head attachments. The desk was designed to make utilizing this machine as efficiently as possible and many of the features added help this desk meet that design goal. Some of the features it includes is a cutout towards the back of the desk that spans from the top down to allow a hose to pass through. This hose connect the printer to a vacuum on the bottom to suck out wood particles when using the CNC along with toxic fumes when laser cutting. Other aspects include the 3D print filament draw that is designed to hold 6 rolls of filament easily and allows for quick access to all of them. The desk also include at top draw for holding the different head attachment along with tools and miscellaneous parts that are often used while operating the machine.
Bio Inspired Play Project
The aim of this project was to use an animal's behavior to design a game for 4th graders. My group selected the brown bat for our project and came up with several game ideas based on the bat's behaviors (echo location, nocturnal, hanging upside-down, and cave climbing). We prototyped using cheap materials like cardboard to get a better idea of the feasibility of ideas. From there we utilized 3D printing and laser cut wood sheets to further prototype and test our game. We tried many different materials and play tested them for durability. In the end, our game was designed around a bats ability to use hooks to crawl and the kids with "crawled" along a net while riding on a card to pick up insects at the ends of the net. This project helped with rapid design, iteration, and utilized 3D printing, laser cutting, band saw, table saw, and miter saw.
Epoxy Resin Pour Table
The resin table was an attempt to create a clean, one of a kind desk that allowed me to use new building methods and tools. The project had a few key steps: creating a frame for the table, laying down the wood and pour in resin, planing off offsets in the wood, sanding and routering the edges, and finally finishing it with a sealant. The project utilized a sander, planer, track saw, and miter saw. The project had a much larger emphasize on fine detail compared to other project and required a high degree of consistency.
