ICE-BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 3

GO! ICE - BREAKER

Our project status (Steven Kung)

This week, our group spent every day completing paper report for GR1 and making power point for in-class presentation. Since we have received almost 80 correspondents from our survey, the first task for us is to analyze all the data we need and accumulate those numbers into charts to observe the habits and feeling of our correspondents. Our second version questionnaire, which we added to 15 questions to cover every aspects, really provide us a great opportunity to study each elements in GR1. Using the data for age and user experience, we can easily build up a market research and persona/scenario to help us proceed our next step, such as designing characteristics of products. Also, by creating QFD table, we can translate customer requirements into technical description which makes us know, for customers, what the most important characteristic is and which characteristic we can neglect. To complete competition analysis and market value proposition, we search a lot of information for snow/ice removal products on Amazon or eBay. Compared the price and function of existing product with our survey, we can induce a product characteristic table for our design, which explains well about our product value and characteristic. Thanks to GR1, we can know deeper about our design direction and are happy to proceed our next step.

Exciting/interesting finding (Qiongyu Lou)

This week we finished gate review one and first presentation. I feel that we made a great work which makes me feel excited. At first, I think we will have a rough time because we aren’t native speaker and we might not be able to express in right way during paper writing and in-class presenting. However, we did a great job at presentation, and feedbacks from classmates are variety. I feel that our group started to know each better since we share same background and we all have passion to make this project perfectly as teammates.

There is a milestone. I used to form team with American classmate, even sometime we share different thoughts, but I still feel the project can be successful because they have better expression with professor. After this team formation, I feel in different way because we as a team can talk to each other in a more clear way sometime in same native language that really helps the communication within and helps us come up a better idea based on all of our thoughts.  

This time, I feel that the power as a team is really great and it does easy to get used to each others’ work style.

I love our team.

Challenges (Ziwei Xie)

At first, we identified drivers who suffer cold winter to be our user group. At that time, we didn’t think too much about subdividing user group or focus on certain feature to meet certain user group’s meet. We just think removing ice on car in the winter should be a problem and decide to work on it. However, after doing interviews, survey, market research, competition analysis and market value evaluation, we discussed our ideas with Pro. Brei. She gave us a very important suggestion to focus on old people. For old people, on one hand, standing in cold winter wind and snow is easy to cause them sick; on the other hand, their energy limitation contributes their need. Besides, they can afford this kind of products. So we decide to follow Pro. Brei’s suggestion and change our user group into old people aging from 50 – 70. The challenge is that we already conducted our survey, and it was based on our friends aging from 20- 30. We might need to redo a survey to figure out our new user group’s need.

Another challenge might be, in the next step, designing the product. What kind of solution can we provide to user? We have several ideas before, like using an automatically cover, adding deforesting materials to wipers. Next week, we need to focus on solution and feature design. Focusing on reducing time and make the process automatic. 

Future Plan (Chee Wee Lee)

Now that we have just done with Gate Review 1 and presentation, I suppose we should do a reflection session to revise everything that we just did. For example our problem statement, although we had changed it a few times, it should be more specific according to professor, to be able to tackle the problem more effectively. Besides that, we will be having a regular weekly meeting with our coach to discuss what are the problem we are having in our Gate Review 1. On the other hand, this coming week we will be having another meeting with our Professor Brei to talk about the Gate review 1 as well, and also our coming plans. On a side note, maybe we should organize some dinner party to enhance our team bonding and our communication :D

ICE - BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 2

Our Project Status (Ivan Manuel Gunawan)

In our second week, we begin our progress by setting up a quick meet on Sunday (9/15/2013) to brainstorm some more ideas and problem statement that we might want to pursue. There were a few problem statement being pitched in, such as:

1. Risk of accident happening to car passenger when opening the car door in a highly traffic city with lots of motorcycle users.
2. Damage to car power window electricity system due to rain drops which fall inside the car when the window is opened.
3. Raising the driver’s awareness of the car surroundings while driving, by installing camera on the sides and rear part of the car and display it on the speedometer space.
4. Making a more efficient car bumper which can absorbs impact during car collision.
5. Car light issue at night which often distracts the other drivers viewing capability.

However, after thinking ahead and doing a quick poll on each ideas, we decided to stick on our car and snow problem statement like discussed in 1st week meetings. We also managed to divide up the task we need to do for GR1-activities list, specifically for number 1 – 3 just because we haven’t got any lecture for the rest of the activity at that point of time.

We also discuss about some strategy and topics we want to discuss with Coach Sou before our scheduled meeting with her on Monday (9/16/2013).  We expanded our problem statement ideas in car and snow into 2 different part:

1. Problem with car and black ice in winter slippery road.
2. Reducing time taken to shoveling off the snow from the car surface.
3. Wiper that can breaks the freezing ice on the front window panel of the car which often blocks the driver’s sight.

Our meeting with Sou went pretty well, except knowing that we have a lot more to discuss within a short 20 mins timeslot given. She started the meeting telling us about “why” and “Duncker” diagram which was really helpful for us to composing our problem statement.  She also kindly provide us with the correct problem statement template to make sure we are doing it right. Before the meeting ends, she told us to send her our composed survey questions that we have made earlier, and then she will help us to correct it.

During our Tuesday class time period, we also managed to split up the job to complete “GR1-Product definition” list. We have set Monday (9/23) to be our deadlines to submit all our partial documents and then start making the report and presentation together.

Exciting/interesting finding (Yaqi Huang)

Gate Review 1 is approaching, which means a lot work should be done in this week. We met a lot and an interesting thing happened. A very good translator appeared in our team. Since we all know Chinese except Ivan. Some time when we argued in Chinese, Cheewee would translate to Ivan automatically. Another fun thing was that after a-week discussion we went back and chose the first topic we had. And this topic is about how we got our team name. what’s more, I made a questionnaire with Steven. This was first time I made a questionnaire. It was cool to design different questions, talk to people and collect information. During the discussion, I even had some new ideas of the solution. Like a circular machine can stick on the window, and move automatically to clean the snow. I feel like I am a detective. Through the talk, I can collet and sum up the information I wanted. Everyone in our team are preparing for the design, for the GR1. We all aim at the same target. That made me feel powerful and awesome.

Future Plan (Qiongyu Lou)

After whole week meeting, we finally decided our launching project as we planned and design a questionnaire. We are starting to send them out and promote our questionnaire. Hope we can get feedbacks from the market by the middle of next week. After collecting these feedback, we will analyze and come up with a more practical solution that can meet all the requirements from the voice of market. In addition, we will also analyze several key attributes from the current solution and decide the most important features for our product to be used and to be developed. Besides those market and customer research, we will also read some patents and literatures to be referenced.

Challenge (Steven Kung)

After our meeting with Coach Sou, we found that we need to define a more specific and detailed problem description to help out design our product. During the first meeting, our team members are all struggling with what products we should design or how function we should include; however, we ignore the fact that product design should stem from customers’ need. Thanks to Coach’s pointing out, although we try to make a questionnaire that looks like cover all the information we want, it turns out the questions we ask lack of deep and detail information, such as color preference, safety issue, etc. Since next week is the due for GR1, we really need a lot of survey data result to build up the QFD table. And the most difficult problem we face is that how can we get the information from manufacture and marketing? If we don’t come up with a real product, how can we ask the manufacturing and marketing people to give us feedback? For me, if I am a sales guy, I don’t know how to market my product if it does not exist…so as the manufacturer……

ICE-BREAKER Weekly Refection - Week 1 - We are ready!

Hey, this is our team. We are ICE-BREAKER.
We have five team members from ME, who are super smart and creative, and one team member from SI who is good at graphic design and user research. We plan to solve a problem in cars, although, at this point, we have not decided what exactly it is. We are in design. 
Go blue! Go IEC - BREAKER!

Our Project Status (Ziwei Xie)
The landmark of this week is that we formed a team and we narrowed our topic into one problem in cars. We held group meetings on this Monday (Sep. 9th) and this Thursday (Sep. 12th). We discussed a lot about the topic. By far, we mainly have had two ideas. One is about the snow and the car as it takes quite a long time to defrost the ice and snow on the car. We all have a hard time in the cold winter wind shoveling snow on our cars, specifically Ann Arbor has such a long winter. The other idea is about reckless drivers as driving for a longtime is boring and easy to feel tried. Reckless is not safe for drivers, which is certainly a problem for most drivers. However, we researched the market and found out for both of these two topic, there are already maturely products solving them.By far, we have not decided what our problem/topic is. We decided to talk with our friends and ask them what problems bother them while driving. And then, we will have a meeting tomorrow night to choose two problems from them and finally decide our problem.

Exciting/ interesting finding (Chee Wee Lee)

First of all, I would like to mention a fun fact about our group – we are all Chinese ethnically, though some of us don’t speak Chinese language. This is really cool, considering we are from all around the world and various background. Back to our group project and discussion, we had a couple of meetings and we have gotten quite some work done. During our meetings, our discussion mainly revolved around the topic or problem that we should be focusing on in our project. It turned out that we have chosen a general topic which is related to automobile. We then narrowed down the problem statement to focusing on a certain issues – ice/snow on vehicle, reckless driver and vehicle safety. In the midst of discussion, we thought of tons of solutions to the issues we selected, which by now we should know we did wrongly, because we are supposed to come up with the issues we have, instead of the solutions. But most of were very surprised by the latest technology install in the newest vehicle. We kind of found out tons of interest stuff in vehicle by exchanging the experience we have had in our personal or friend’s vehicle, because most of us have been in different cars, ranging from a normal sedan to a luxurious premium vehicle. For instance, one of us talked about a futuristic GPS which projects onto the windshield, which is something we normally see in an action movie. It is amazing that all these unexpected technology is actually achieved in our real life. On a side note, I personally thought myself as very outdated in terms of the latest technology, and that I should update myself from time to time. Also, it was a very fun and exciting conversations I had with my team members.

Challenges (Ivan manuel gunawan)

So after doing all those brainstorming during our first meeting, we went to Prof. Brei to consult about our ideas. However, she says that we are doing the projects wrongly. We should think about the problems first, and don’t think about solution just yet. With that being said, we continue the discussion talking about our two possible problem definition, which was car and snow, or reckless driving in car especially sleepy and drunk driving. Narrowing it down to these two, she suggest us to just focus on the car and snow topic, since it seems that the solution would involve more mechanical engineering type of work, and that reckless driving problem might lead us to a more electrical field. She also adds that car companies are already doing a lot of research and solution on the reckless driving part, which leave us less room to provide new innovative ideas.

Talking about our proposed solution with the linkages and automatic / portable car cover, she raised another problem saying that it was too simple to be done by a group of 5 Mechanical engineers and 1 school of information grad student. She was proposing to implement more thermodynamics solution such as blower, heater, or other stuff.
Other than that, I was also doing research on those snow car cover, and snow removal device on the internet, and found out that people already thought about a very similar concept that I had in mind, and they have actually had a physical product ready to go to the market since 3 years ago as I looked from their youtube videos.
So thinking about these challenges, we might have to come up with more innovative ideas if we want to stick with car and snow problem. Or, we might have to think about some other issues with automotive world which we also talked as a group during our meeting last Thursday, 9/12/2013. Another possible breakthrough that we can do is by thinking more critically about other issues outside automotive world. Getting ideas from the patent list I believe would also help us to generate more creative ideas and solve our current challenges.

Future Plan(Yaqi Huang)

At this moment, we still haven’t decided the direction of our project. So during the weekend, each team member will talk to their friend who drives a car to find which part of the car they don’t satisfy with. Then we will meet at Sunday and listen to each other’s opinion to choose some workable directions. After that we will officially begin our research. Some of us are going to make a questionnaire and ask people to do it. At the same time, the others are going to do the literature research about such a topic. Based on the survey and the literature information, we can narrow down the direction. This is the plan for the following week. Once the direction is decided, we will start the brainstorm to create a solution.