This week for our design project, we spoke on the phone with one of the pediatric occupational therapists at the Susan Gray School, Heather Winters. On this call, we spoke about some of the current equipment available at the school. Heather went into depth about which pieces of equipment seemed especially useful for the children, as well as what pieces of equipment they felt could potentially be improved. As for the toy cars, there were many design aspects Heather mentioned that she felt would be useful for both the development of individual children and the range of children for each individual car could be used. Talking to an occupational therapist was extremely helpful, since some of Heather’s design insights were ideas that one without her specific knowledge likely wouldn’t come up with. Some of these examples include a 5-point harness and the ability to tilt the car seat at various angles.

In addition to this, we talked to Dr. Teresa Plummer from the Belmont School of Occupational Therapy about next steps moving forward with the Susan Gray School. She solidified the ideas that we came up with after speaking with Heather and mentioned that moving forward in the Susan Gray school may require some extensive protocols for approval. Luckily, Dr. Plummer has a new graduate student starting at the Susan Gray School in January of next year and if we are able to get a prototype working before then we would be able to work alongside her graduate student in studying the development of children with mobility issues. The paperwork would be accounted for and we would be able to test our design in a controlled environment.

Moving forward, we have established a timeline for some key stage gates moving forward. First we will be visiting the Susan Gray School this upcoming Thursday in order to talk to Heather Winters about the needs of the children as well as seem what kinds of design aspects we feel are most important. Working with the children and observing them in the setting which they would use the mobility devices will help us understand all of the needs of the design. We are then meeting as a group at the Wond’ry to be trained and learn about the manufacturing equipment that we have at our disposal. With the manufacturing capabilities in mind, our designs will be more streamlined and cost effective. Next, we will gather all the information from our conference calls, and visit to the Susan Gray school to develop an extremely well defined set of design requirements. We have set a meeting with our advisor to discuss our progress of these milestones, and set out a productive path moving forward.