Intensive Design Experience . . . No Kidding
While most kids were heading off campus to begin their long awaited summer plans, I was bunkering down to participate in the ten day long (rightfully named) Lyle Intensive Design Experience. At about 17 hours a day, the program was by no means a calming end to my school year, but it was an exhilarating experience where I was able to see just how much I could cram into 10 days.
The project began at a lighting pace as we were introduced to the project parter (bc workshop) and our rather broad goal for project: measure a communities health like engineers. With extremely limited direction, we were basically instructed to, "Figure out how to apply engineering to a social measure" . . . well then. . . Needless to say, we had our work cut out.
project introduction at bcWorkshop
Two hours after meeting with bcWorkshop we had not only been thoroughly acclimated with every map of the community from the last 40 years, but almost felt at home as we were presented with individual interviews of community members. With a general understanding of the neighborhood under our belt, it was time to visit ground zero. As we traveled down the streets of Dolphin Heights we began to feel the hugeness of our task settling in. We finally realized what we were were being instructed to do.
Couldn't have picked a better day to wear jeans
A fence... Isn't it fencetastic
As the day came to an end we found ourselves back in our natural habitat (the wonderful, delightful, airconditioned, innovation gym). Already into hour ten of the day it was time to start the real work, brainstorming. With a flurry of sticky notes and an abundance of odd ideas (kid tracking, really?) we were well on our way to solving the impossible problem - how do you measure a communities health with sensors? As we went from one side of the spectrum, (Wifi tracking and monitoring - really creepy and mildly illegal) to the other side of the spectrum (interactive community notification boards - not creepy and totally awesome) we started to realize it was time to call it a night and wait for our clients final say.
Covering the walls with sticky notes!
After we had the opportunity to sit down with bcWorkshop and discuss our ideas we finally settled on one of our most creative, and my personal favorite, idea. Monitoring a community by measuring spikes in noise levels. The idea was simple, if a community was healthy it would have a large quality of neighborhood communication. In other words, next door neighbors actually talked to each other, kids went outside and played in the streets, and families would spend time together, Not only that, but we determined there would be a correlation between how much foot traffic a community had an how much car traffic the same community experienced.
Once we agreed on a direction the parts were ordered, the prototypes began, and the miles of soldering commenced. Things were coming together, board were be being built, and we actually felt like we had a feasible direction for our group. Then he came....
After soldering for 9 hours straight I think I'll stick to CS
The prototype is taking shape
Testing, testing it's so fun. Testing, testing it must be done!
THE CAMERAMAN.... the most efficiency blocking, time sucking, unhelpful person I have ever met. Yes, yes I know publicity is important, but goodness me please don't tell our Electrical Engineers to turn of their fume extractors that are sucking potentially poisonous fumes away from their lungs because they are too noisy. I would have personally escorted you out of the room, the building, and the university if I didn't care about keeping my scholarship money. Not only that, but NO, I will not stand there and move sticky notes around so your video can have busy work in the background. In the words of our director, innovation doesn't happen quietly, we aren't here to make movies, we're here to help people and solve problems....
Now that I'm done with that little rant, I really am proud of SMU for starting to bring in publicity for the school. The programs at SMU Lyle really are some ingenious, well thought out, and unbelievably helpful programs, and they deserve much more attention than the get.
"Sit there and look busy, don't actually do anything, just move stuff around" - Camera Man
Ok, maybe I am a little bitter, but really, does that thing not have a zoom feature?
So anyways... The next six days were a fury of building, learning stuff doesn't work, figuring out why, rebuilding, figuring out something else doesn't work, figuring out why, rebuilding... repeat.
The cutest little Arduino I ever saw in my life
Our completed pibe bom.... errrr, I mean sensor bundles!
Of course no project would be complete without a little Raspberry Pi! (Used to collect sensor data and push it to the web)
The boards are slowly coming together, ready to be assembled
The finalized product ready to be hung and to start collecting data
Finally, after a collective 1360 hours of work between our seven person team we were done, complete, finito, and it was time for me to work my presentation magic. With 10 hours until our final presentation I started cranking away at our final demo, while the other computer scientist put final touches on the website, and the rest of the team finished up the beautifully put together documentation.
Beautiful presentations make everything better
bcWorkshop website welcome page
Website interactive display map
Documentation makes the world go round
The final presentation to bcWorkshop and the Dolphin Heights community went on without a hitch. With a little humor, and a lot of love the project come to it's completion. Overall, this was by far one of the most intensive design experiences I have undertaken (second only to first year design). It was a fantastic chance to help a wonderful community, and I learned a lot about leadership and engineering.
Testing is pretty dang important.
When getting a team back on task follow up your request with a call to action.
Engineering can be applied in so many places, even something as far reaching as measuring community health through audio evaluation.
Make sure you order the right wavelength receiver for the transmitters you bought...
While it is important to take a break, don't let your team fall into a, "Oh, we've got this" mentality until everything is done AND tested.
Don't by an air quality EGG from Wicked Devices.... they don't work.
Code for the project is available here
Information on Lyle's IDE Experience is available here
