Concept Map

The problem which I wanted to delve deeper into was that of money; namely that as students, we never have any spare money to spend on cool gadgets or projects.

I explored different ways to obtain money for ideas, including venture capitalism, just earning money through fundraisers or a job, grey-area illegal activities, and lastly setting up a collective grant system.

Problems to be Improved

• The current school website is outdated, ugly, and above all confusing to navigate. Kind of a bad sign when it takes 5 minutes to get to where you want, and even then it's in a completely non-intuitive place.
• The SchoolLoop app, ported directly from iOS, is  hideous, nonfunctional, and poorly optimized. Contrast these: 
  
• Finally, personally I have had many ideas which I thought would be quite interesting to build and test, but I have never had enough money for them. However, researchers seem to be quite well funded. I wonder where they get their money...

Lines

I drew my Nexus 5 in Inventor, making sure everything was proportional and as accurate as I could get it without a ruler.

This week, I learned that lines can communicate feelings of serenity, anger, sadness, happiness, and many others. The shape, shading, and composition of a line determines what people can feel while viewing it.

Diana said that my lines were very 'sketch-like', and generally conveyed a clear idea of what lines were where, and how they were used.

Self as Designer

As a designer, I would see myself as not especially good at drawing, but as better with words. During this class, I would like to learn to better be able to express my ideas through the methods of writing, drawing, and CAD usage.

Product Improvement

For the project, Austyn Coffill and I chose to improve paper, as it was the first thing that popped into my head. In improving this product, we brainstormed the weaknesses of paper. Namely, paper is vulnerable to water, fire, and tearing. We chose to address those weaknesses directly and not to add any unnecessary bells and whistles, since paper is, after all, just paper. To make the product fireproof and waterproof, Austyn and I made the paper fabric out of a blend of denim and cotton, like that used in US treasury bills. We also treated the fabric with an alum-based solution to make it fire-resistant.

Bridge Project

9/8/2014: Bridge Project

As I came to this project late, I don't really have any clear cut answers to the first two questions, though I do have some as of yet unformed opinions. As for the third problem, though, I believe a successful team encourages its members to generate ideas, and integrates them. It is important, however, to ensure quality control in a democratic way. If I were to start this project over with the same team from the beginning, I think I would have attempted to push forward a more elegant and refined design. The current design, while extremely stable and strong, seems to me like a brute force method to the problem, costing an enormous amount of resources and time-in other words, unlikely to get approved by government officials.