Olin Projects
Olin prides itself in it's project-based curriculum. I have had the opportunity to participate in thirty-five team projects while at Olin. I chose the ten I felt were most impactful on my growth here at Olin.
Designing for Diana
Engineering for Humanity, a primarily first-year course combining engineering design and anthropology, is the epitome of interdisciplinary learning. Co-taught by a computer scientist/designer and an anthropologist, the two subjects are seamlessly integrated into a service design course. Students learn about the issues associated with aging and partner with senior citizens from the local community to build a product to help their community volunteer age in place for longer.
As a part of this course, I and two other students designed and manufactured two products for our elder teammate, Diana. One product, a modified cane, was designed to help Diana get out of bed in the morning. She would roll over in the middle of the night and then be too stiff to roll back in the morning. Because she was so nervous that she would get stuck in bed since she was living by herself, she was considering moving out of her home. Our modified cane was a simple, unbreakable product that gave her back her independence and her dignity. The other product, a modified "grabber", helped Diana pick up paper off of the floor. While doing her checks and other paperwork at the kitchen table, she would sometimes drop a piece of paper on the floor. Because she had some balance trouble, she was afraid to bend over to pick up the paper for fear of falling. This meant that she would need to wait, sometimes days, for someone to visit and pick up the check so that she could finish her paperwork. She said this made her feel silly and incapable since it seemed like such a simple task and she was unable to do it, even with the grabber that was supposed to solve this issue for her. The grabber we made for her, which was modified to be able to pick up single pieces of paper as well as larger objects, resolved this for her. I learned several lessons from this course and the woman I worked with. Diana taught me how to knit, how to bake cakes, how to talk to boys, and probably more that I don’t even recognize now. My own grandmother had passed away just before I graduated high school, and Diana filled a void I didn’t even know I had. The course taught me to take a close look at the needs and values of the person you’re designing for instead of relying on your own knowledge of them and that simpler products were often better than their more complex counterparts. Top picture: the team sitting around Diana's kitchen table brainstorming solutions to pick up paper from the floor Middle picture: Diana trying out a prototype of the product to help her get out of bed in the morning Bottom picture: demonstrating the finished product to pick up paper |
Using Technology to Support Aging
The Aging Research Group is a fledgling research group on campus made up of two professors and four students. I, as one of the founding students, worked with a professor specifically on how technology can be used to aid the elderly as they age. My responsibilities were both to build the group and awareness of the group on campus and to advance several projects to create a foundation for the group.
To build awareness of the group on campus, I designed and developed a website documenting the work done by the group. I presented my work at several conferences to build Olin’s name around the world. To forge connections with our local community, the group also ran several free workshops building empathy around aging-related diseases and issues and volunteered at local assisted living facilities and senior centers. A few of my past projects with the group include designing a scheduling app for elders with little to no technology experience, designing and prototyping an attachment for a walker to hold an oxygen bottle, and modifying a walker tray to hold a cup without spilling the liquid inside. One project in particular stands out in my mind – modifying the walker tray. Laurie, the woman using the walker, had post-polio syndrome, which means she is slowly losing her ability to move around. When I worked with her she couldn't really move around anymore, used a walker whenever she did move, and rarely got out of the house. One of her biggest challenges was carrying objects, especially liquids, from her kitchen to her armchair in the living room. A student team had worked with her in the past and sewed her custom bags for her walker so that she could carry mail and water bottles. My job was easy – all I needed to do was find a way to stop her cups of juice and soup from spilling during transit, which was an already-solved problem. I bought her rubber cup covers and considered the problem solved. Thinking back on this experience, however, I think Laurie taught me more than I taught her. Even though she knew it would only get harder and harder to move, she was still about the happiest woman I have ever met. She always had a smile and a good story to share. One I still remember is when she told me about her recent volunteering at a local elementary school as part of a program called Sages and Seekers. Elementary-school-aged students get together in groups and “interview” older adults to learn about their past. The goal of the program was to get young kids comfortable around their elders to help combat ageism. The lesson I learned was that even though Laurie was struggling alone with this gradual loss of movement (there was nobody else in the house), she still found time to give back to the community, work with kids, and bring smiles to more faces. Top picture: students participating in a workshop designed to build empathy by simulating issues related to aging Middle picture: screenshot of the Aging Research Group website I built Bottom picture: Laurie and my research partner showing off the rubber cup covers and custom walker bags |
Designing for Boston Street Musicians
User Oriented Collaborative Design, a sophomore level course at Olin, teaches user research, product design, and customer needs identification skills. Students form teams of four or five around a user group that they would like to study. Beginning with interviewing members of that user group and trying the activity themselves, students work to identify what the correct problem to solve is instead of jumping to conclusions.
My team of five interviewed and co-designed with street musicians in Boston, Massachusetts. After identifying their needs and values and coming up with hundreds of ideas, we designed and created a "looks-like" prototype of a Musical Haven, a revolutionary speaker using noise cancellation technology projected to exist in the next 10-15 years. This speaker puts the musician at the audience member's center of attention by removing distracting background noise. This product solved a need that the street musicians weren’t even aware existed – they blamed the burnout they felt on long hours, difficult weather conditions, and low numbers of audience members. It didn’t occur to them that it might be from lack of audience appreciation due to too many things vying for the audience members’ attention. Since we took our time and interviewed dozens of musicians, we had a broader perspective and could identify and solve the root of the problem, not the symptoms. Since we focused so much time on identifying customer needs, we also made sure our design had a good product-market fit. This is an essential skill to have as an entrepreneur in order to have your business succeed. Top picture: my team interviewing a street musician in the Boston subway Bottom picture: the finished looks-like prototype of the Musical Haven |
Redesigning the Course Registration System
Course registration is a very stressful process that students are required to participate in. In a course called Human Factors in Interface Design, my team took on this problem and worked to alleviate some of the pressure associated with registering for classes. Human Factors in Interface Design combines design with computing with the goal of redesigning an existing user interface to be more user-friendly.
By focusing on the different behaviors associated with registration, my team identified several key processes around it – planning in order to graduate on time, getting feedback on workload and subject-content of courses, balancing the schedule so that classes do not conflict, and finally registering for courses. The current registration system only supports students actually registering for courses and resolving class conflicts by stopping students from registering for two courses that meet at the same time. Students have developed a variety of other ways to accomplish the other tasks associated with registration but do not use a standardized system, which means that advisors have trouble tracking student progress toward graduation, the registrar has no way of knowing student plans and thus cannot tell how many sections of each course to offer, and the students themselves often do not have a plan for the future. My team strived to solve these issues by creating a web-app to support registration. Top picture: prototyping with users at a low fidelity Bottom picture: finished course registration tool |
Laser-Cut Elegance
As part of a course called Real Products – Real Markets, I and my partner created a business called Laser-cut Elegance selling laser-cut cards with butterfly designs. Real Products – Real Markets combines business and entrepreneurship skills with mechanical design and fabrication. Students start and run a business for the better part of a semester and learn several skills as a result.
In this project, I designed the cards and the website to sell them, marketed and sold the cards in person, and used a laser cutter to prototype the butterfly design. I learned about outsourcing production and negotiating with a company to get the best quality product for my customers. I balanced the costs of high-quality materials for my cards with packaging to showcase them. I also developed empathy for entrepreneurs starting their own businesses – I was in a safe school environment and still burned out quickly. I can only imagine how challenging it would be to start a business without the support structure I had in place. Picture: the Laser-cut Elegance promotional picture after I had learned how to use the equipment and props in the photo studio |
Spectrum - Prioritizing What Matters Most
In a course called Integrated Product Design, I worked on an interdisciplinary team of engineers, industrial designers, and business students. Our goal was to create a product that advanced the Internet of Things and solved a specific problem in society related to wellness. My team explored the space of designing for people with concussions and developed a product we called Spectrum. Spectrum let people with concussions stay connected with others around them even though they couldn’t look at a screen via a color-changing voice-activated home decoration. The product would be a big improvement to their lives which was rewarding to our team.
Unfortunately, the business case didn’t look nearly as promising. Very few people have severe enough concussions that they consider buying products to support them for the short amount of time they are banned from screen use. My team needed to pivot to find a larger user group so that we would be building a viable product. We chose to dig further into the issues that screen time overuse caused and made a few startling discoveries. Excessive screen time has been linked to increased levels of obesity, attention deficit disorders, and even heart attacks, as well as a decrease in the development of empathy and compassion. We also interviewed several people who used screens for several hours a day, many of which wanted to reduce their screen time but didn’t know how. Spectrum did have a user group, but it was not limited to the customers we initially saw. This was an important lesson I learned about how to begin a design with a very focused user group in mind but to not limit yourself to that user group as your customer base. One major challenge my team faced in this project was the different language we each used to describe what we were thinking and the different working styles with which we approached the problem. I as the project manager needed to learn quickly how to “translate” between three very different disciplines to keep my team focused as a cohesive unit on solving the issue at hand. Top picture: one of my teammates showing Spectrum in context Bottom picture: demonstration of Spectrum's technical feasibility |
Empowering Youth through Job Skills Training
As part of an interdisciplinary, service learning-based course called Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship, I worked to empower youth in Clarksdale, Mississippi by building job skills and giving them a safe space to learn and grow after school. My team partnered with several local organizations such as Griot Arts Program and Clarksdale Revitalization Inc. to accomplish this goal. We spent a few weekends in Clarksdale meeting with local high school students, town officials, and budding entrepreneurs, found comparable organizations with similar goal statements in the Boston area, and ran workshops with local interested groups in Clarksdale.
Affordable Design and Entrepreneurship is a team-taught course by faculty from both Olin College and Babson College. Students from both schools are encouraged to enroll in the course. The class operates as a firm, running and funding three to four projects which each continue for two to four years. When I took the class, projects were in all stages of the pipeline – some were mature and almost ready to be deployed as small businesses outside of the ADE firm and some, like my project, were just beginning. My team’s goal during the semester I took the course (since we were in the opportunity identification stage of the project) was to lay the groundwork for future teams. We needed to identify a location to focus on, people in that location who were passionate about developing their city, and ideas that combined the skills that our team members brought to the table and the needs in the location we chose. A goal of this course is to operate as close to a firm or business as possible. Students join a project for a semester or two but ultimately the project must continue even with high turnover of team members. The course heavily emphasizes documentation of project decisions and interviews with users/customers. At the same time, we as students were learning to work in a real-world setting with people from very different backgrounds than our own. It was sometimes challenging to communicate with our Babson business teammates since we used different vocabulary and had very different working styles. This is another valuable lesson I took away from participating in this course. Top picture: showing the dichotomies in terms of wealth and looks in Clarksdale, MS Bottom picture: brainstorming project ideas with students in Clarksdale |
Cameli - Reinventing Tea to Lower Environmental Impact
How do you lower the environmental impact of making a cup of tea using a tea kettle? This is the question my team explored in a course called Sustainable Design. Beginning by purchasing and using a tea kettle and interviewing others who used tea kettles to heat their water, my team started to identify the behaviors surrounding tea and the goals associated with making tea. When people are making tea, they often don’t like the taste of coffee but are still looking for the comfort of a warm drink and the caffeine to help them continue their day.
A tea kettle is a 4-96 product. This means that 96% of the environmental impact comes from the use of the product and only 4% comes from the materials used, the manufacturing, and the transport to the user. The obvious step was to reduce the impact by use, which required identifying the major contributors to environmental impact. As it turns out, the biggest impact comes from heating water; since water has such a high specific heat it requires an incredibly large amount of energy to heat to near-boiling, which is the temperature that most tea leaves need to be steeped at to release the oils that hold the flavor. Instead of approaching this problem like a traditional engineer and creating a more-efficient product, my team chose to take an entrepreneurial approach and redesign the experience our users were trying to have, while still addressing the needs and goals they had while drinking tea. We created Cameli, a concentrated frothy drink similar in concept to tea as how espresso is similar to coffee. By combining a new drink using less water heated to a lower temperature and a new machine that was well-insulated and used human-power to froth instead of electricity, my team reduced the energy used by a factor of ten in Cameli as compared to your typical electric tea kettle. One of the key problems my team had to solve was why people drank less of espresso and of certain teas in other cultures. For instance, Japanese Matcha, Tibetan Po Cha and Argentinian Yerba Mate are only ever consumed in small quantities. This is because of the overwhelming strong flavors and thick consistency of Matcha and Yerba Mate, and the intensely filling characteristic of the Po Cha. At the same time we spoke with espresso drinkers about why they chose espresso over coffee; many said it was for the quick shot of caffeine and some went on to say that they prefer the taste to that of regular coffee. We incorporated some of these traits of espresso and other types of tea into Cameli, which was a four-ounce, highly caffeinated, flavor-intensive, smooth and creamy drink. Top picture: delving into why people drink tea Bottom picture: the ingredients and materials used to make Cameli |
Designing Activities to Teach Sustainability to High School Students
I and a team of four other students from Babson College, Olin College, and Wellesley College have partnered with Wellesley High School to introduce more environmental studies into the high school curriculum. Currently there are no options to learn about sustainability or environmental studies, but the school itself is a LEED certified building and highly resource-efficient. The school itself is a great resource for students to learn about sustainability, but is currently underutilized. Many students don’t even know about the green features of the building!
As part of the capstone project-based course for the three-college sustainability certificate program, my team tackled this issue. We developed a set of activities that incorporated sustainability into several other disciplines. For instance, one activity had students work in teams to create short videos to raise awareness on campus. Another combined sustainability and computer modeling to see how changing different parameters in the building (such as number of hours lights were on and how thick windows were) affected the energy use in the building. My team leveraged our wide range of backgrounds to show how sustainability affects everyone, and how people can use skills developed in a variety of contexts to support sustainability awareness. Picture: Wellesley High School front entrance |
Care.com - Solutions to Support Aging in Place
For my year-long capstone project in engineering at Olin I and a team of four other Olin students worked with Care.com, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based company. Care.com is a leading provider of child care, home care, and pet care. Their business model is based on matching people seeking care with qualified caregivers in their community. Currently, Care.com is seeking to expand their business and become a leading provider in the elder care space as well. The company has tried a few different angles to get a footing in this market but has so far been more or less unsuccessful. As such, Care.com brought a project to Olin asking my team to help elders age in place longer and with a higher quality of life, in order to have elders and their families think of Care.com when a precipitating event (such as a stroke or major fall) occurs. Aging in place refers to when an elder is able to remain in their own home instead of moving into an assisted living facility.
Throughout the course of this project, I had the chance to interact and support multiple elders in my community, and the product I handed off to Care.com has the potential to support many more. A 2012 study done by University of California – San Francisco campus found that 43% of seniors surveyed reported feeling lonely. This loneliness causes a 59% higher chance of decline and a 45% higher chance of death. Therefore, my team chose to focus on the opportunity area of meaningful connection and community in our product so that senior citizens may experience an increased joy of living. This issue will continue to impact more and more of our population. In 2010, senior citizens (people over the age of 65) made up about 13% of the population; in 2030 this number will almost double to 19%. At the same time, the number of working adults (people aged 20-64) will drop from 60% in 2010 to 55% in 2030. While these numbers may not sound impressive, this will drastically change the ratio of working adults supporting seniors from about 1 senior for every 5 working adults in 2010 to only 3 working adults for each senior in 2030 (see the study). This will strain family relationships and result in increased caregiver burden, decreasing joy of living. This project also included other parts of the GCSP curriculum. My team was made up of engineers from several different backgrounds (computer science, electrical engineering, design) and our project incorporated many disciplines, including design, business, software development, user research, and anthropology. It included an entrepreneurial component since we needed to show how the product can be monetized to make it seem feasible to the company. Finally, from a global standpoint, my team took inspiration from the ways that different cultures view aging and incorporated this into our project. For example, in India there is a much wider acceptance of death and decline, and senior citizens are treated as having a wealth of knowledge and information. This is very different than the culture in the United States where youth is idolized and ageism runs rampant. Top picture: me and Stella, one of our interviewees, posing with her dogs Middle picture: exploring what a stereotypical life journey looks like Bottom picture: co-designing with some of our users |