Personal Growth: what strengths and weaknesses did you learn about yourself? How are you different now?
My strength lies in my skills in fabrication and designing. I am familiar with most of the technologies available to us and that helps us with the making of the project. I’m also fairly comfortable with human interactions but I came to realize how I was actually not as fluent and easy around people as someone like Max, sometimes when we have meetings with our community I find myself just sitting there and listening more than actually talking and communicating (especially with my teammates). However, I’m more comfortable with it now that I have cooperated with our community for this semester. Obviously having a very nice and welcoming community definitely helps, but through that, I have also gotten better at communicating with them in a way that is efficient in learning about their needs, like how we express our questions on the design of our product in a way that’s easy to understand for our communities and the volunteers that we are working with, and also sometimes a chill chat about their and our lives helps to get their talking mood going. So those are some things that I found very useful.
Civic Engagement: what did you learn about the approaches of working on a project? For example, teamwork, communication, understanding needs, etc.
the biggest thing I have learned was how much thinking we have to go through even when we are designing a product as simple as these garbage tongs. the user persona and what things they actually pick up and things like those are highly site-specific, and also working on new material is hard because time should be spent in understanding the properties of it and careful documentation of those properties is crucial.
for teamwork, I think having three very talkative and action-oriented people is the biggest advantage we have, all of us have ideas and none of us are afraid to just confront each other and be like “hey your idea sucks, and here is how we can improve it”. Of course, we developed this bond and friendship over this semester to even be able to be so straightforward with each other, but in the end, we do feel like a team. we have an idea, we are not sure if it works but we quickly get to do it and test it out, very little time is spent in discussing and fighting over “could this work?” or “is that what they want” or “is this what Marcela want?” and stuff like this, we do it, we like, and we test it with the community or among ourselves, and we keep moving.
for understanding needs, again we are fortunate to have a community that is very understanding and very direct in terms of their needs and what they expect us to do. so what we had was a bunch of goals we needed to reach, and we are just working towards bringing them to live the best we can one by one.
Academic Learning: where did the community experience align or not align with the academic content? What have you learned as a result?
I think the biggest difference is how we want to use plastic but they just want the best pair of tongs possible. because in our meetings they clearly stated that for the same design, the wood ones work better than the plastic. so what we did later on in our final iterations are mainly trying to match the properties of the plastic to woos as best as we can, like all the ideas trying to fix the wobble in the plastic, which is not a bad thing, it just gave us an opportunity to think of different solutions and be creative about it. so in a way this misalignment in turn pushed us to think more and have better design in the end
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