For my first d.studio mini assignment I decided to attend the City Studio Open House. It was an awesome event and I’d love to tell you more about it if you’re interested.
This blog post is my second mini assignment – an example of how I utilized the ASK, TRY, DO process in a different Sauder course.
I am currently taking COMM 466: New Venture Design and within this course I have had the opportunity to work with some very talented engineers. As part of the course requirements the engineers have spent the past 8 months building a working prototype of our product. Our product is a medical device that induces therapeutic hypothermia in post – cardiac arrest patients. Very simply, we are developing a blanket that cools the patient’s core body temperature. In order to assist with infection control we developed a disposable portion for the device that can be placed between the patient and the device that can be thrown out after each use. Why am I telling you this? Because I became an engineer for the second semester of the course and had the opportunity to spearhead the prototyping of the disposable portion with one of the three engineers.
Annelies (the engineer I worked with) and I went through the ASK, TRY, DO process numerous times in order to come up with our finished prototype.
ASK
– What is the purpose of the disposable component? What areas should it cover? How heavy should it be? How will it attach to the device? How will we account for different body sizes? What should it be made out of? What should our prototyping costs be? What should our actual COGS be?
TRY
In order to do some rapid prototyping and answer some of the key questions – we used what we had around the house: a garbage bag and a measuring tape.
We answered (or tried to) our questions from the ASK process and came up with the requirements for our prototype. Once we decided on our requirements we did some online browsing, we talked to a few people, and we went to a Fabricana to buy some materials. We had to get a little creative… we used a meal-sealer to make jel packs and a very old sewing machine to put it all together (very professional, I know). We did six iterations of the prototype before we settled on one that we felt was good enough to present to the professors.
DO
After each of the six iterations we showed the prototype to the rest of our team and they gave us some great feedback which led us back to the TRY phase. Next we showed some of the prototypes to our professors and then the final iteration to medical professionals and received more valuable feedback. We have a long way to go before this disposable component actually touches the body of the cardiac arrest patient but as long as we consistently iterate and flow through the ASK, TRY, DO process I’m confident we will get there 🙂
