Palace of Promise

Throughout junior and senior year of high school, Olin was my top choice largely because of its curriculum. I wanted to be doing engineering, not just learning about it, and I appreciated the focus on engineering starting and ending with people. It was the community that eventually led to my decision to go to Olin, but it was the curriculum and education model that initially attracted me.

The Problem of Grades

In my post on feedback, I mentioned that there's a complicated conversation around grades at Olin. We talk a lot about intrinsic motivation and so want to minimize focus on single number or letter, and as a community we tend to favor detailed feedback over just giving a grade. But in almost all classes, professors do still have to give out grades at the end.

Midterm Season and Spectral Theory

I'm done with midterms! Galois Theory and Extremal Combinatorics were some of the last classes to have exams; those midterms were on Tuesday. The Complex Analysis test was last Wednesday, and the Topology exam was the Wednesday before that. I've gotten my tests back in all my classes except Extremal Combinatorics, and overall everything went pretty well! While studying, though, I realized that it had been a while since I'd taken normal tests.

In my first two years at Olin, I took sixteen classes and only six exams. If I stretch my definition of exam, that maybe goes up to ten, but one was really a long, cumulative problem set in Transport Phenomena, and the other three were Biology quizzes, which each took a full class period to complete but all together accounted for only 20% of my course grade. Of the six "real" exams, two were self-graded based on effort (Physics of Waves and Bayesian Stats), and three were take home, open book, and open note tests in Dynamics. The last was an in class essay exam for Soviet History.

My exams for Topology, Complex, Galois, and Extremal were all in-class tests, so we had about 105 minutes to complete them. The first three were closed book; for Extremal we were allowed to use our class notes. All four of those classes will have final exams in December. Spectral Theory is exam-less, since it's based around us presenting our work to each other, and Hungarian will just have a final exam.

Reflections on Semester 4: User Oriented Collaborative Design

In which I really don't know what to think of UOCD. (It is a design class, after all.)

UOCD Final Photos

I took a lot of pictures after my team's final UOCD final presentation. I thought about putting these in my UOCD reflection post (coming soon!), but there are a few too many, so here they all are! My team named itself the Mathemachickens, and our user group was recreational mathematicians. We designed Abacus, a space in which recreational mathematicians and other curious people could discover and design mathematical art and objects together.

The view walking into my studio. My team's space is in the back left corner of the picture.

We strung up some of our old material that we still needed to reference. This photo shows our personas, which we made in Phase I and modified at the beginning of Phase II.

Here's the rest of that "clothesline." The bigger poster is information from our codesigns, and the yellow poster is some mini product posters for our more developed ideas.

Build a World of Foam

The third phase of UOCD is called "Develop." At this point, we have one or two ideas, and we're supposed to narrow down to one and take it all the way to a final model and a product poster. That final model is generally some form of a looks-like prototype. In class last Thursday, we talked about how to make that model.

The answer is lots and lots of foam and foam-core.

Two speakers came to class and talked to us in the auditorium. One was a designer at Continuum, and he showed us lots of pictures of various parts of Continuum's design process and of some of the models and prototypes they've built. Something that was really interesting for my team was seeing that they had built full-size models of hotel lobbies or restaurants out of foam-core and foam for a couple of projects. If we choose to go with the Puzzle Cafe, something like that is an option. (We've talked about maybe turning our workspace into part of the Puzzle Cafe.)

The part of class that I found more exciting, though, was when Beth Sullivan talked to us and did demonstrations. She's a well-known model maker in this part of the country, so she was mostly showing us how to work with foam and foam-core. This doesn't seem like it should be that complicated; we did a lot of work with foam-core for sketch models in Design Nature, and we've been making simple representations out of blue foam since Candidates' Weekend. The difference is knowing how to work with a material and knowing how to work well with it. We want the representations we do in this phase to be clean and accurate, so Beth talked to us about the grain of foam core, using a rabbit tool (which helps with nice corners in 3D objects), and how to cut basically anything out of blue foam using a hot wire cutter.

A lot of us left saying things like, "Can we be her when we grow up?" Beth was a lot of fun, and I felt like watching someone work with the hot wire cutter to make models of everything from a crinkle cut french fry to a hair dryer was really useful. When I heard people last year talking about this class period, I think what I heard was the 'in the auditorium the entire time' bit and not the 'but it was super awesome' bit, so I was really surprised to enjoy this session as much as I did.

Imagine a World

Yesterday was the Phase 2 Design Review for UOCD, so I spent most of Wednesday (and a total of more than 22 hours over the past 6 days) in my team's corner of the design studio. There are many pictures and some description of what we've been doing below the fold!

Our space on Wednesday. We're going to reorganize it a little for the final phase, so there will be pictures of that next week!

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.

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.