I really enjoyed my first week in Paris and it matches my vision fairly well because I have visited before. I have enjoyed the class so far and enjoy working on developing our prototype. Seeing our first design work as a proof of concept and seeing the arms actually grip the water bottle was a large success. It helped our team feel like we will be able to accomplish everything we wanted to by Friday. Going forward, using a compliant mechanism for the hinge could help improve the reliability and allow other people to make their own. Using a compliant hinge would reduce the different parts that need to be printed to only three and means the entire water bottle could be 3d printed by anyone in around 2 hours. This would help our design be able to be widespread and used by multiple people. Our design could also be easily adapted to fit individual people’s needs very easily. If we have time we could make a webpage that has all of the files and could include multiple size ranges for different water bottles. We also have a better idea of how we plan to attach the water bottle holder to the wheel chair which is something we will start working on tomorrow as we keep iterating on the compliant hinge. I think that this could be a very good solution to having an accessible water bottle for wheelchair users because everything our team has found online does not appear to be adjustable which causes issues with liquid spilling out which becomes more of an issue when the liquid is hot and has a risk of burning the user. I feel successful in my contributions to the team and I think that everyone in the team has contributed a lot. I think I struggled the most in the low fidelity prototyping because I wanted to go straight to CAD. I think the highlight of my week was seeing the medium fidelity cardboard prototype work for the first time and seeing other people interact with it. We still need to work on the lid which was a new objective we got today which will be challenging to allow for it to work for cups of different heights while still not being bulky. So far our team has worked very well together and we have been able to collaborate very effectively. I hope this collaborative teamwork continues this week and even gets stronger as I continue to work with the team. The advice I would give to students visiting Paris next year is to make the most of the first day so that they can see a lot of the city before class starts and it would allow them to visit another city on the weekend if they want. I visited Luxembourg City this weekend and it was another highlight of my week because it was my first time visiting Luxembourg so it was really exciting visiting another country for the first time. Overall this week has been a highlight of my summer and I am looking forward to continuing to develop the prototype this week.
