Beautiful Wood

Yesterday, I took a quick trip into Cambridge with my FBE team! I've been spending a lot of time off campus for projects recently, but most of those trips have been user visits for UOCD. We've been in teams for The Entrepreneurial Initiative for about a week, though, and my team needed to go to a woodworking store.

The Entrepreneurial Initiative is a required class, and it has changed a lot over the years; it seems like Olin has never been sure quite what form it should have. We shorten the name to FBE (pronounced 'fib-ee') because the course used to be called Foundations of Business and Entrepreneurship, and the acronym stuck. In its current incarnation, the class is focused on starting a business in teams of about five.

All the students came up with product/project ideas, and we pitched them to each other. Based on those pitches, we formed teams. My team was formed from the merging of two project suggestions that were both pitched with the idea that we would make a simple product, not spend too much time on design details, and focus on learning basic marketing and finance.

After our first meeting, we decided that we would make wooden coasters. Part of what we're working on this week is design, since there's still some involved in the project, so we needed wood for prototyping. Three of us went into Cambridge to Rockler Woodworking. I didn't know all that much about wood, and I'd never been to a wood store before, but I enjoyed the trip a lot more than I expected I would. The employees were really helpful, and we got some beautiful wood for prototyping:

From left to right: white ash, zebra wood, padauk, walnut, and Bolivian rosewood

My favorite is the padauk, which is the red wood. Another wood I really liked (though we didn't end up buying any of it) was bocote.

The timing of this is pretty interesting. Because a lot of my UOCD users are people who design or make mechanical puzzles, I've been around a few woodworkers, and they've all talked about types of woods and how they choose them. If you'd asked me a month ago what I thought some themes of this semester would be, I would never have said wood, but it's been a really fun surprise.

A puzzle designed by one of my team's UOCD users. There's a lot of symmetry, including color/wood symmetry.

Do-Learn at Olin and French Philosophy

Yesterday, for my French class at Wellesley, I read an excerpt of a book called Le Maître Ignorant  by Ranciere, and the excerpt focused on a French professor, Jacotot, who, after the restoration of the monarchy in France, moved to the Netherlands and taught there. However, he spoke no Dutch, and his students spoke no French. Nevertheless, he was able to teach French literature by giving the students a bilingual copy of a book and having them read it and write about it. The essay then goes on to analyse the role of teachers in various manners of teaching, and it argues that explaining material should not be part of a teacher's role.

I found this reading particularly interesting because it's closely related to my experience at Olin. Some phrases that people use to describe the learning experience at Olin are Do-Learn, Just-in-Time, and project-based. These all imply a greater focus on learning from trying something than on a lecture model. Do-Learn is what it sounds like: learning from doing. Just-in-Time generally means that students are working on some project, and when they reach a point where they need information or a skill they don't have, then they learn it. Project-based is a term we usually use to contrast our classes with problem set courses, and it implies that the course is organized around the projects, not just theory. In reality, most Olin classes involve some amount of lecture or explanation on the part of teachers and/or NINJAs, but it's often less than in the vast majority of engineering, math, and science courses elsewhere.

One Reason I Love Olin

It has snowed several times this week, so Facilities has been working really hard to keep the pathways and parking lots clear. The first Candidates' Weekend was this week, so that was especially important. This means we've all gotten used to getting emails from Facilities asking students to move their cars to certain lots so that it's easier to remove snow. When I woke up on Friday morning and saw an email from the facilities director, I thought it would be about parking, and I very nearly didn't read it, but the title was "Snow Removal Thurs. Evening," which seemed odd.

The Facilities Snow Removal Team had been out late on Thursday clearing snow around campus. When they were done, they went out to the parking lot to dig out their own cars and go home. Upon reaching the parking lot, though, they discovered that a group of students had already dug out their cars for them. The email was a thank you.

User Oriented and Collaborative Design

The only time at Olin after first semester that every member of a graduating class takes a course together is spring semester of sophomore year, and that course is User Oriented Collaborative Design. In UOCD, we're split into teams of five or six, and each team designs a product or experience for a specific group of people. (The classic user group example is bike messengers.)

The whole point of UOCD is that engineering design should be for someone. Design should happen with the user in mind. In the first semester, Design Nature is meant to be a class in going from ideas to a final prototype, but UOCD focuses on earlier steps in the design process. We start with a group of users, and where we end up won't be much beyond ideas. The final deliverables are "design representations" (often foam models) as opposed to functional prototypes.

The most important part of UOCD is the user group. It took us about a week to get sorted into teams based on user groups. Over the weekend after the first class period, we all went out and talked to someone in a group we thought would be a good user group. Some of the user groups that were suggested were amateur blacksmiths, elderly swing dancers, door-to-door evangelists, and suicide hotline volunteers. We wrote about our conversations, read each others' write-ups, and voted on a few user groups that sounded interesting. There were a couple of rounds of voting to narrow down the groups, and then the profs put us into teams based on our preferences. The user groups that made it through to the end are volunteer physicians, blacksmiths, mathemagicians, people who refurbish old cars, drag queens, and people who commute on public transportation.

My team's user group is mathemagicians! We've been especially focused on people who make geometric puzzles, but they're generally interested in recreational mathematics more broadly. The first phase of the project involves meeting a handful of people in the user group and getting to know them. So far, my team has talked to one mathemagician in person and one on the phone, and we have a few user visits planned for next week. It's been a lot of fun talking to mathemagicians so far. They really love math and showing other people why it's beautiful and cool, and it would be hard to not get excited when we're around them.

The classic image of UOCD is a room whose walls are covered in butcher paper and sticky notes, and that has already begun. This is my team's process diagram, where we listed everything we want to do in various parts of the first phase of the project. We have another piece of paper with our schedule on it and yet another with all the information we gained on our first user visit. We're not quite to "Undergraduate Opportunities in Coloring and Drawing" yet, but we're getting there.

The team is the other really important part of UOCD. Everyone says that having a good team is much more essential in UOCD than in most other project classes (which is a little unfortunate, given that the teams are somewhat random). This is because teams are the same through the whole semester, and we just start with a user group, so it's really up to the team where to go from there. My team is fantastic. There are five of us, four Oliners and a Babson student, and we're all really excited. With a good team and an interesting user group, I think it'll be fun semester.