Adaptive Formal Wear
For Senior Options, I worked with Runway of Dreams and Victoria Rossi to create an adaptive prom dress. Senior Options is a program at my high school that allows students to do an internship or independent project in lieu of attending classes from the beginning of May until graduation to help students learn practical skills. After spending hours trying to find my perfect prom dress and having no luck, I began thinking about how frustrating and inaccessible shopping for prom dresses and formal wear must be for teens with disabilities. I reached out to Mindy Scheier, CEO of Runway of Dreams, an organization that designs adaptive clothing, and pitched my idea for my Senior Options: work with a differently abled teen to create the perfect adaptive prom dress. Soon after, Mindy connected me with Victoria Rossi, a teen from New Jersey with muscular dystrophy who uses a wheelchair and loved the idea of designing a prom dress with me. My Senior Options allowed Victoria to focus on the magic on prom and less on the frustrations and logistics involved in finding a dress that would be suitable enough for her to attend and enjoy her prom and inspired others both in the abled and disabled communities with our story.
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Vape Detector
Out of school, I have been working on another project. In the past year particularly, the prevalence of teen vaping has increased exponentially, and I have experienced this first hand watching my classmates and friends become addicted. This school year has been full of the effects of vaping, the most disruptive being the constant fire alarms that take away from class time and put unnecessary strain on our local emergency responders. I feel very strongly about the issue and was somewhat inspired by the viral youtube video of a glitter bomb for package thieves by an ex-NASA engineer. I have been working with someone with a Ph.D. in applied mathematics to develop a way to hack smoke alarms or adapt nicotine detectors to send a silent alert. I hope that this tool will mean bathroom vaping no longer disrupts class or strains emergency services. With this person's help and my new found passion for computer science, which I have developed this year taking AT Computer Science, my project would allow school administration to quietly and quickly deal with vaping on campus and encourage vapers to quit.
Communication Tool
In my AT Entrepreneurship class, my partners and I are creating a communication tool to help students with multiple disabilities, such as verbal and gross motor disabilities, communicate more efficiently and effectively so they can get the most out of their education. This is our first working prototype but since then we have improved greatly. We designed a structure that sits atop a phone or tablet screen that can reflect an image or video and make it look like a hologram. This component paired with our app will allow students to choose a phrase or emotion, using existing selection technology tools, and convert that selection into animation on the holographic component and also plays audio through the app. This way students who may not be able to express themselves verbally or through body language can communicate with others. The hologram can be viewed by both the user and the person they are communicating with making it inclusive for everyone. Furthermore, this tool can also help students communicate with their peers and even strangers because it piques interest and can counteract any fear or nervousness anyone might have trying to communicate with the user. Our intention was to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of communication in order to help students, but now we realize that our tool also creates more value by making the user feel more included in control. When my team and I pitched this to the CEO of Tommy Hilfiger USA and Tommy Adaptive, he was extremely enthusiastic about it and has connected us with his innovation team. We are working hard to bring this tool to the differently abled community as soon as possible.
We dove deep into the design process trying to get to what we thought the heart of the communication barriers that exist in the disabled community by visiting a home for students with disabilities.
Empathize: Communication in the Sunshine Home, particularly between students and their teachers is inefficient and does not allow students to effectively get a teacher’s attention which brings on feelings of frustration, discomfort, and exclusion. In classrooms, we observed that students were frustrated when trying to get a teacher’s attention because they did not have access to an effective method of doing so. We were told that some students have resorted to pulling out medical equipment to get a teacher’s attention. Define: We want to help students gain access to a tool that helps them communicate efficiently and effectively. We thought this was the most important because interaction is a vital part of being human and almost everything depends on communication. If we can make communication better for these students then they might have more opportunities in their relationships with other, education, career, or just in life. Ideate: During this process, we came up with many ideas and returned to this step many times. Eventually, we realized our ideas were divisible into two categories: inputs and outputs. We could either design new inputs like button systems etc. or a way to output speech, animation etc. We choose to focus on the output because we believe it creates more value by being the method to which efficient and effective communication is created. Prototype: Our first communication tool was an input method. After getting feedback that many similar tools exist, we went back to ideation and came up with our seed idea for holograms. Many prototypes later we have a half looks-like half works-like prototype of the idea we want to take further: our holographic communication tool.
Phone: Friend or Foe?
In my Junior year, I worked with a team of selected students to help design the Advanced Topics Entrepreneurship course that began officially in my senior year. This course mainly focused on social entrepreneurship regarding the phone usage of high school students. We presented the results of our year long project to administration and teachers. I learned a lot about the design process and collaboration during this project and use these new skills in the official course I am currently in this year.
Here our teams mindmap the systems surrounding our potential problems.
Here our teams learn from an expert about reframing a problem during an in school field trip.
Here our groups discuss our plans for our end of year presentations.
Paragolf
In this project our Design and Build class broke into teams to help a fellow student be able to tranfser independently from his wheelchair to an adaptive golfer. My team's prototype was a just a stationary bridge but over time we realized that that would be too cumbersome and bulky. We adapted and made the bridge collapsible and store inside itself. We also added a pump level similar to one on an office chair so Simon you easily raise the seat above the wheel of his wheelchair and the wheel of the paragolfer. Later we added handles based on feedback from Simon. In the end, our team's project was not chosen to be our final pitch to Simon however, I did work closely with other students to help bring the winning design, a simple ramp and parallel bars, into reality and learned the importance of considering simple solutions instead of overlooking them.
Storage Solutions
Prototype 1
In my Junior year, I took a Design and Build course at my high school and our final project was to design something to improve the new STEAM space that was recently added to our school. My team started our journey given the task of creating more efficient storage solutions for prototype. In our early stages, we drew inspiration from Lego blocks. We coined the term "Build a box" as our idea which consisted of three to four preset sized for stack-able boxes. These boxes would have a small window so you could see the prototypes inside and easily identify your box. Inside would be a drawer so that you could leave the box stacked and take the drawer with you back to your table. We spent a long time on this idea trying to make it better by adding the windows, the drawer aspect and the different sizes. This is where we saw the part of the design process that makes innovators go back again and again to the start, constantly looking for feedback from their users, our classmates, and figuring out what features would best help them. During this stage, we were pretty open to ideas and references from others but towards the ends of this prototyping phase we got bogged down and were not as excited about the idea. I wish we stuck with this idea more because I think it had some real potential but instead we changed our idea radically.
Prototype 2
Our second prototype was not one of the better decisions we made. We decided to use the same space were were going to allocate for our build a box but for a drawer set with a slat wall on the front similar to ones we had elsewhere in the room. With our previous prototype, we got concerned that it would be difficult to reach prototypes in the back on underneath lots of boxes, furthermore we thought that stacking the boxes from large to small, bottom to top, would not necessarily be followed by our classmates but it was crucial for our design. Instead we designed this set of drawers that housed large prototypes inside and smaller prototypes on the slat wall so that they would be organized and easy to access. The issue with this prototype was that is was too similar to the current storage strategy we had for prototypes, a slat wall, which was not working. In the end we scraped the idea altogether like you often do during the design process. We looped around and started from scratch.
Prototype 3 (the final prototype) Iteration 1
For our last prototype we changed the location of where we planned to store these prototypes. We decided to use the shelves that were currently unorganized and filled with junk. We designed drawers that were angled so that it was easier to pull out each drawer, especially for drawers on lower shelves that required you to bend down more. We also came up with a handles that helped you pull out the drawer from he bottom corners. While this design was practical, the angle on the box was too slight towards the front and we figured out that we needed it to dip down more in the front to get a good ease of motion and the handles were not convenient.
Prototype 3 Iteration 2
In our second iteration, we changed the angle of the box to slope gradually then dip down a lot then continue a gradual slope until the end so that the box could be pulled out easier. We changed the handle to be a cutout and reinforced it with a dowel. After the fact, we realized it we used Masonite instead of cardboard we would not need to reinforce the handle. This iteration was much closer to how we wanted our prototype to turn out because it had the functionality and efficiency to work the way we wanted. We continued with the idea that you could bring the drawer back to your table to work by having the drawer completely removable from the shelf.Finally, we finished this last prototype by making three preset drawer sizes, like the build a box, custom for each shelf. We laser-cut Masonite as our material and spent a lot of time, effort and frustration in fusion 360 cutting notches in the box to make each piece fit together. We resized our original file to each dimension but with our smallest box the notches were a bit short and the handle was a bit big. If we had more time we could have fixed that issue. We also used a technique of gluing for our final prototypes that sealed the edges and corners of our drawers completely and smoothly for a sleek look. We made the files for each box available below.
STEAM Faire
A couple years ago I helped run a booth at my district's middle school STEAM faire. As a presenter at the faire I helped run the Rube Goldberg inspired innovation challenges where anyone could come and build part of our contraption.
