This interview was conducted by team Fornax, which includes Ethan, Frances, and Gia. We interviewed Jeff on Tuesday November 1st, at 6pm. Our team went into the meeting with the intention of learning about Jeff’s daily struggles effected by his disability, and what he wants to add in his life. However, we also wanted to let Jeff know our intentions and limitations, and make sure he didn’t have any questions. Our hope was that after the meeting we would have a few ideas on how what kind of assistive gadget we could create to make Jeff’s life better or more convenient.

Agenda:

Before the interview we wrote out a bunch of questions and follow up questions that we planned to run through. We didn’t plan to use it as an exact format where we went down the list. It was more so just to make sure we had enough questions to get a solid interview. I think we went through almost every question.

We also wrote up an outline for an introduction to make things clear with Jeff so he knows where we are coming from. It was mostly based on the outline Zach gave us.

Here were the list of questions:

Say: our names – our backgrounds

Ask client to introduce themselves: name, interest in participating in this

Say project goals:

• Trying to build prototype useful devices (making a convenience machine/ gadget)
• Engaging in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process
• Taking about seven weeks to go from this meeting to a reasonably high-fidelity final product (explain timeline)

We are not

• Professional technologists who are experienced in making polished products
• Planning to build something that will be sold commercially
• Constrained by any practicality outside of usefulness to the person we’re designing for
• Likely to invent a totally novel piece of electronics (say limits of Arduino)

Ask client if they have questions about process

Interview Questions (follow up questions in bullet points)

Are there any Daily life activities that are frustrating/difficult? You can list it or go into detail about a few?

• Can you group your problems into a couple big categories
• Can you demonstrate it?
• What makes it difficult?
• Is there a product you think that can help mediate this?

Is there something you use to enjoy doing that has become harder over time?

• • Is there any creative ideas you have to help this issue
  • Is there a way to make it somewhat easier again
  • What would encourage you to do this activity again?

Could you narrate or draw your daily life?

• • • What’s the typical routine?
    • Common emotions throughout the day?
    • What do you look forward too?
    • What do you not look forward too?

What do you care about?

• Why is it important to you?
• How would you want to implement it more into your life?
• What ways can you think of that would bring this into your life more?

What do you need that maybe you don’t always get?

• What hinders you from this

How would you improve your resources and tools now?

• Ways to add on or subtract?
• Is a completely new device needed? Or add on to what you have now?

Tell us some story about inconveniences that come up in your life?

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways:

Before we could design a unique device for Jeff, it was important for us to understand Jeff’s hobbies and interests. The meeting started with us asking Jeff about his daily routine. Jeff highlighted that his favorite parts of the day are playing video games with his best friend, recording and watching YouTube, and sitting on back porch. Jeff informed us that he decided to participate in this project because he: “likes the invention of new technology”. After getting to know Jeff a bit more, we then began to explore possible avenues in which a device could assist Jeff in his daily life.

At an earlier point, Jeff mentioned that he works as a receptionist at CLASS for a couple days of a week. We asked if there were any little annoyances that he may experience due to being in a wheelchair. Jeff told us his only pet peeve is wh

en the receptionist working the previous shift doesn’t cleanup after themselves. We decides as a group, that this in an avenue we don’t want to further explore. Naturally we then talked more about Jeff’s life at home. We learned that Jeff has a two-year old nephew, who occasionally leaves their toys out on the floor. We asked Jeff he deals with this situation, he told us that he would always get someone else to clean the toys up. This striked us as a possible avenue that we could explore. We also learned that Jeff sits on his back porch because his front porch is at a slight angle. Jeff emphasized to us that he is always nervous about being on the front porch without someone behind him. He said if he would feel more comfortable if he knew that he would be okay by himself.

Quick sketch of wedges elevating a wheelchair

Towards the end of the hour, we talked to Jeff about his YouTube channel. We learned that Jeff likes to make reviews about music albums. We asked Jeff about how he records his videos. We discovered that his setup was very minimalist, he simply records only using his computer in one take.

Quick sketch of the Toy Sweeper

Thinking of ways to create the toy sweeper

Post Interview Thoughts: 

Our interview did not quite go how we expected. Jeff was quite satisfied with how his life functioned and it was a bit difficult for us to ideate some ideas for how to improve his experience. It was difficult to get the conversation started, but slowly but surely, we discovered more and more about Jeff’s life. The agenda we had come up with was definitely not adhered to, as we came up with a lot of follow up questions that we didn’t ever get to. 

I think part of the reason that our interview was not quite as successful as we wanted it to be was that we came into the interview assuming that Jeff would have suggestions on what he thought might be a good gadget. Though he was very receptive with ideas that we suggested, it was difficult to get him to complain about his own life. 

In hindsight, our team wished that we asked a little more about the details of the wheelchair itself, as a lot of our ideas were built on improving the wheelchair. We could have asked about the dimensions or the braking system, which might have been good jumping off points for possible ideas. The ideas that we came up with were quite mechanical, and were grasps on the parts of Jeff’s life that we thought we could ease even more, but not necessarily the most achievable and reasonable ideas. 

That being said, I think our interview served its purpose. We got to learn more about the life of Jeff, and we came up with several possible project ideas that we can build on. 

We are Team Andromeda, made up of members Francesca Menendez, Ethan Hu, and Sharon Li. For our final project, we are working with Teri, a person with cerebral palsy who communicates through a digital tablet with a voice assistant, to make her a device that can assist her in some of her everyday activities. Our interview with Teri was held on November 1st, 2022, at 9:30 AM at the CLASS (Community Living And Support Services) center in Pittsburgh, PA. We loved getting to talk to Teri as she was incredibly helpful in the interview process and had lots of ideas of devices that could help her, which made the interview process very interactive.

Teri’s Daily Activities and Beginning to Form Ideas

More Ideation

Meeting Agenda

• Introductions
  • Go around to give a brief introduction of each group member and give some insight as to who we are in terms of our name, major, interest in the project, and additional information we would like to share about ourselves, such as our past projects in this class.
  • Have our client, Teri, give a similar introduction about herself, including insight into her motivations for volunteering for her project. 

• Explanation and Clarifications 
  • Share the course website to relay information about the time frame of our course project. 
    • An important date to mention, is November 17th, 2022, when our prototype is due, and they are invited to come for the critique, where we can receive direct feedback from them. 
  • Give a brief overview of the project and explain clearly the objectives of this project and clarify what we are trying to achieve and what we are not trying to do as outlined in the course website notes.

• • • We are:

• • • • Trying to build prototype useful devices

• • • • Engaging in an iterative design process, including gathering formative feedback around the midpoint of the process

• • • • Taking about seven weeks to go from this meeting to a reasonably high-fidelity final product

• • • • Documenting our process

• • • We are not:

• • • • Professional technologists who are experienced in making polished products

• • • • Planning to build something that will be sold commercially

• • • • Constrained by any practicality outside of usefulness to the person we’re designing for

• • • • Likely to invent a totally novel piece of electronics (we combine many existing available components in new ways, but don’t make components)
  • Ask if there are any questions or clarifications needed to be made about this project throughout this portion of this meeting. 

• Understanding Needs
  • Plan to keep this part more flexible, see how it goes depending on the conversation, and ask guiding questions based on this. The goal is trying to devise possible technological interventions that could aid specific problems or be an addition to her life. 
  • Asking various questions to Teri that could lead to potential discussions about areas of her life such as:
    • See if there are any ideas she has thought of beforehand.
    • Sharing her daily routine. Is there anything that is frustrating for you that you would like to have some help with? 
    • How have you currently worked around some of your problems?
    • Can you demonstrate any of the actions for us or share photos of assistive devices that help you already?
    • Something that you used to enjoy doing that has become harder to do? What are some of your hobbies?
  • Share some possible ideas we could do and mock-up solutions. 
  • Discuss and establish some categories of “problems” or areas we could help in and narrow the conversation towards that.

• Conclusion

• • Thank Teri, for her time, for allowing us to talk to her more in-depth about this project, and for inviting us to CLASS. 
  • Ensuring we have each other’s contact information. 
  • Take pictures of anything necessary or relevant to our project and a group photo.
  • Reiterating the overall project schedule, specifically where we will be making substantial progress, such as our project ideation and prototype critique.

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways

Through our meeting with Teri, we learned a lot about her daily activities and some of the hobbies she dabbles in, which helped us steer our ideas toward something that might help add to one of these processes. From the get-go, she was very helpful in describing what are some things that could be improved in her life – we got the impression that she would like a device that allows her to do more things by herself. Because she cannot do some things herself currently, she brought up some things that might help her to become more independent – having a device that would allow her to strap into/take off her foot straps when she pleases was a great idea she contributed. 

Teri’s current foot strap, which is quite loose

Another thing she explained to us was that she struggles with drinking. As part of her cerebral palsy, she cannot suck using a straw or hold a cup up to her mouth. This brought us to another idea, using a robotic arm to allow her to be able to drink a cup of water by herself. However, with the project’s time frame, making sure a robotic arm wouldn’t spill water all over her in the process would be difficult, so we turned our attention to her hobbies to see if there was anything we could do to help her.

George and Teri demonstrating how the tablet is attached and can be unattached from her wheelchair.

After her father, who was present for some of the interviews, mentioned her interest in music, she told us about her weekly music rehearsals using accessible musical instruments with others. We learned that one of the main instruments she uses is simple – a tambourine attached to her leg that she can shake to make sounds. This brought us to our idea of making her an accessible musical instrument that would make music based on the position of her feet on her chair. Our meeting with Teri opened up a lot of pathways for what we could possibly do for this project to assist her in some way, and the ideas we came up with together look to help her become more independent and make her daily activities more enjoyable.

Sketches Developed After Our Interview

Thoughts After Holding the Meeting and Discussing

Our meeting with Teri was awesome, she was eager to talk and interact with us, considering she had some ideas already prepared beforehand. Since we have a relatively loose agenda, everything goes according to plan, if not better. Initially entering the meeting, we were concerned that we would have trouble trying to find what aspects of her life we would be able to build a gadget for her to somehow improve her life. 

However, Teri was very interested in our project and offered us several ideas that we can expand on. It was relatively easy to go from topic to topic and try to ask follow-up questions that could possibly segway into some areas of her life we could help her with and be able to learn more about Teri and her likes and dislikes. It was super nice to get to know her more and try to figure out what she would enjoy in terms of what gadgets we could make for her. Generally, we would not have anything we would want to do differently next time in terms of asking her questions or any questions we wish we would have asked. One thing we did wish to do was probably get a physical measurement of parts of her wheelchair beforehand so it would help us along the way later on, as all of our designs have some connection to her wheelchair. Overall, we all agree that our meeting with Teri went very well. We have gotten a lot of great ideas to work with and understand Teri’s lifestyle with her disability. 

Group Picture!

Introduction

Our meeting with Dennis sought to explore some difficulties that Dennis has in his life—difficulties that we might be able to help overcome with the creation of a bespoke device. Dennis is a 67 year-old disabled man, facing both the challenges of disability and old age, including being wheelchair bound. The information that we gather through this need finding interview will hopefully guide our functioning device to effectively assist Dennis in his daily routine, driven solely by his wants and needs. At this meeting was Dennis, one of his caretakers, Bill, Elise, Harry, and Remy. The meeting was held at the CLASS facilities in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, November 1.  

Agenda

Prior to this meeting, our group decided on the following subjects to complete during the interview: we wanted to first learn about Dennis (i.e. age, disability, interests, passions), we wanted to then transition to introducing our project to him to give him insight as to what we hoped to accomplish, and then we were to brainstorm ideas as a collective with regards to improving his quality of life. We decided to stray away from a more strict agenda for the meeting and instead focus on the quality of response.

Meeting Summary and Takeaways

Notes from the interview

Our meeting with Dennis went fairly well. We began by asking Dennis about his interests, which notably included: going out to eat, watching sports games like the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Steelers, playing “Candy Crush” (which we later found out was Angry Birds), soda-pop, and art. This discussion naturally led into what gives Dennis trouble in doing these activities and enjoying these things. Dennis, besides being wheelchair bound, suffers from a lot of shakiness in his hands; Bill believes this to be symptoms of arthritis. For example, for Dennis to do art, he must use a “hand-on-hand” method, where he will use another person’s hand as stability on the tool, but will guide their hand with his. This shakiness also manifests as pain when Dennis tries to grip things or press small buttons, making things like using a remote or a video game controller difficult. 

Dennis struggling with computer mouse

Moving forward, we asked Dennis how his typical day goes. Dennis likes to try to make his bed, which he finds to be difficult. Dennis will also do “school work” and work at the “pop machine”. He very much enjoys soda-pop and wishes he could pour it himself. Finally, at meal times, Dennis tends to be a bit impatient with his caretakers and likes to eat his food quickly, but is limited in how much he can help around the kitchen. 

Overall our meeting went as well as possible despite communication issues with Dennis and we were able to identify various struggles and challenges that he faces on a daily basis. Bill, his caretaker, also gave us good insight on Dennis’ habits and his overall behaviors. It was apparent that he was well adapted to his limitations and has a lot of solutions to the challenges he faces. 

Post Interview Thoughts and Discussion

This interview left us, as a team, a bit confused on how to approach the few complexities that Dennis presented to us. The conversation with him did involve a lot of backtracking and repetition of discussing certain topics; however, we gained true insight into what matters to and are the passions of Dennis. While not as smooth or concrete as we were hoping, the meeting gave a lot of insight into who Dennis is as a person (e.g., an independent, video gaming, soda loving human being). With this being said, the challenges within Dennis’ life that we could obtain are difficult to apply toward a project within physical computing. One of Dennis’ main issues is that his hands are quite shaky and gripping objects could be either difficult or painful due to aging. These issues are inherently mechanical, leaving us as a team a bit perplexed as to what project to create for him. We believed the discussion was overall a success, but we did wish to have more concreteness with regards to the struggles Dennis faces.

Our goal for this project is to design a useful device for someone with a disability. The first step would be to interview our client so we can have a good idea of what challenges he faces and what things he would find useful for his everyday life. On Tuesday, November 1st, our team (Sarah, Freda, Jonathan) met with Bill, who has achromatopsia, so he is legally blind and 80% color blind.

Agenda

Intro:

• Name
• Where you are from
• Something that reflects personal values
• Interests
• How long have you been in PA
• Talk a little about our past projects (project 2)
• What drew you to participate in this project? How did you hear about this project?
• Is it ok to record this?

Clarify scope and expectations:

• We are not professional developers
• Not making something to be commercially sold
• Our goal is to make a gadget that is helpful for you
• Go over our timeline
• Ask if there are any questions/confusion

Questions:

• What do you struggle with in everyday life
• Is there anything you wish was easier to do that you have challenges with
• Was there anything that you haven’t been able to do that we could potentially create something for
• Do you have challenges with running (His sport)
• Ask follow up questions as we go on his responses
• Write down ideas 

Conclude:

• Thank him for his time

Summary and Major Takeaways

Notes/Ideation during meeting

Due to Bill’s achromatopsia he has a lot of trouble distinguishing between colors. Especially blue and white, red and black, and green in general. This causes some challenges when navigating through websites as some functions such as embedded links will be blue on white. The first time he uses a website, he clicks on all the links he can find by seeing when the mouse cursor changes into a hand symbol, and memorizes where on the website it is and where the link leads. Of course, this method may miss some links if the area to click on is small and the cursor doesn’t change. Therefore, we thought it would be useful for Bill if we could make a gadget that checks for the presence of embedded link on the website and locates where they are.

Link Detector (ideation after meeting)

For the same reason, he finds it hard to pick matching clothes in the morning. He mainly guesses the color of the clothing from his past experiences and what colors are more likely to occur in clothing, but sometimes he ends up with mismatching colors, which he finds embarrassing. Therefore, we wanted to address these two points of struggle by creating a gadget that detects and prints out the color of the clothing using a sensor and colors on the website using a computer app. 

Color Reader (ideation after meeting)

Lastly, when Bill cooks on his own, he cannot tell when meat is fully cooked, so he usually ends up burning the food. He tried to use a thermometer but found it to be inconsistent. Using a timer wasn’t too helpful either because timing depended on the type and shape of ingredients and the strength of the heat.

Notes/Ideation during meeting

We found this one to be challenging because Bill has already tried to problem solve and they did not help him at all. So, we ended up with a less feasible idea of using machine learning and training a model to identify if the food is done or not.

Helpful Cook (ideation after meeting)

Reflection

Zoom meeting with Bill ( with audio connection only)

Overall we thought the meeting went successful. Bill was a very nice and active guy. He was open to any and all ideas we had and from what we understand just wanted to see how this process is so he can recommend other people in future years for this class. His main goal in participating in the project was to get disability awareness more widespread and help the younger generation in seeing that people with disabilities are no different from everybody else more so than anything else.

Our first challenge was we were originally planning to do drawings on Zoom, but since he called in on a phone instead of a computer, he wasn’t able to see the zoom so we couldn’t show him any drawings or images. If we were able to change anything about this meeting (and for future meetings), we would have liked it to be in person so we could draw together and receive more immediate feedback vs just based on what he says/describes. However, at the moment Zoom was the best solution since Bill was helping other people with their meetings. 

Our second challenge was that Bill is very high-functioning in his everyday life. He lives by himself, works helping others with disabilities, cooks for himself…etc. This made it difficult to find things he struggled with day to day. He was born with this vision, so he had learned what issues he could work around. After our meeting the only solutions we could come up with were issues related to how he couldn’t see colors. However, we think the ideation has enough variation in what kinds of color-related issues it addresses. Overall, we were able to know a lot more about Bill through our meeting, and hopefully, he will find the gadget we create to be helpful.