Week 4

Two students from the senior design teams came to speak and interact with our class about our ideas, topics, and give insight to our projects. Because they have experienced this first hand, it gives us an incredible opportunity to think about what would actually work for the people of Thailand. With that being said, we discussed with Dr. Moseson and the other group working on transport of heavy loads to decide on our topic.

The pairwise decision matrix that was started last week was completed this week and was used to figure out which two of our ideas were the best. It can be accessed on the Google doc to see the details, however we found out that the modified carrier won by a slight margin over the cleats. After much debate, it was decided that the modified carrier (from previous projects) would be beneficial because it would be continuing someone's work rather than starting from scratch every year. 

The idea for cleats was decided not to be the best idea because the shoes that they were vary - some may have boots but others may not have shoes at all. 

In addition, many of our proposed ideas were things that could just be bought. They are expensive items and the only thing the project would be focusing on would be optimizing an already existing product to a lower cost. With the other team working on a pulley system, we will try to optimize our modifications to include a hook to attach to the pulley. 

Right now, our focus is on clarifying a final design idea so that we can start making this project come to life. We will research ways that things affect a person's back health while carrying things and optimal shapes. 

Week 3

This week, the goal is to narrow down the 12+ ideas to approximately 4 feasible ones. To do this, we will use a pairwise decision matrix.

A pairwise decision matrix is an excel sheet that prioritizes the needs of the people to how effectively they work for each concept idea. This matrix will output all of our needs and rank them from most important to least important. This Excel spreadsheet is very useful in determining what needs our invention should cater to the most. After deciding which needs are the most important for this project, we rank our ideas to see how well each idea can actually meet these needs. 

The ideas that satisfy the least amount of needs will be kicked to the bottom of the pile with the excel sheet. It will calculate the best possible options for our team. In the end, logic, reasoning and discussion can always override the computer generated successful ideas, it is merely a guide. This matrix can be accessed here, found on the Google Drive where everyone can collaborate to the rankings. 

The top four final results of inventions from the decision matrix are yet to be determined. Before lab during week four we should have the top four outcomes thanks to the useful pairwise decision matrix.

Week 2

In order to brainstorm twelve unique ideas, each group member did some research on previous solutions and used their experiences to come up with ideas that were suitable for "solving" our problem. The twelve ideas were collaborated on in a Google doc and can be accessed here.

In addition, we made a visual representation of how our ideas relate to one another. This idea tree is shown below and branches off into subsections until we reach the last row where the actual ideas are. There are many approaches to solving our problem and this tree is the perfect representation of all the different paths we could go. Some are too extensive, expensive, unrealistic, but others (front and back carrier) are very doable.

To keep ourselves on track for the rest of the quarter, a Gantt Chart, or Project Timeline was made. This shows an approximate time period to be working on each aspect of the project. We will refer to this every week to keep ourselves on task and on schedule. 

Week 1

This is the first week of the project. Groups were formed and projects were selected. After getting up to speed with the situations in Thailand from Dr. Moseson (who was in Thailand at the time), brief brainstorming on solutions occurred. Our proposed problem in it's basic form is to transport heavy items up dangerous, steep and uneven terrain without  increasing the laborer's physical strain.

In order to accurately create a solution to this problem that can cooperate with the people of Thailand, an outline of the stakeholder's, their needs, and some specifications is to be created before next week. This document is collaborative through Google Docs and can be accessed here.

We brainstormed ideas as a group for the up-hill transportation system. Some of the ideas include a zipline, conveyor belt, bike gear powered or man powered pulley system, and a treaded wheel shopping cart type structure.

In addition, this very blog was setup, biographies on each group member were created, and tentative project responsibilities distributed.