The Maples Interview Documentation

Introduction

The goal for this project is to create an assistive device for a person living with a disability that can hopefully make their daily life easier. James, Nicole, and Shuyu (The Maples!), interviewed Jen on April 4rd, 2020, in order to gauge a task they could improve for her. Jen has limited use of her hands and arms, which can make certain tasks like putting on makeup extremely difficult. However, Jen can still use her mouth to perform certain tasks. After conducting an hour-long interview, The Maples set out to create a device that could improve an aspect of Jen’s daily life. 

Meeting Agenda

• Ice Breaker:

• • How are you doing? (If you are comfortable sharing)
  • Introductions (names, brief introduction)
    • Us → Personal value, interest, or relevant factoid to make personal connection to client and group
      • What you made for project 2
      • How long have you lived in Pittsburgh and what do you like about living here?
    • Client → interest in participating in this activity
      • Why they wanted to participate
      • Interests in the project

• Clarification Expectation and Project Goals:

• • What we are doing
    • Making prototype devices
    • Solving real problems with relatively complex solutions
    • Participating in the design and documentation process over 6 weeks
  • What we aren’t trying to do
    • Create polished final product
    • Making commercially available products
    • Discover something revolutionary in the world of assistive devices
  • Schedule
    • April 21 prototype critique
    • May 5 final presentation

• Understanding Needs of Client:

• • Are there any daily activities that you have a hard time performing or would like to be able to perform more easily?
    • Could you demonstrate one or multiple of these tasks? (completely fine if not but it would help us get a better understanding of possible solutions)
  • Is there anything that you maybe used to enjoy doing but cannot anymore?
  • What does your daily routine look like?
    • Could you demonstrate? If not, could you maybe draw a cartoon of it?
  • Why is this solution important to you?

• Conclusion:

• • Thank them for their time
  • Get client contact information
  • Iterate schedule of process again just to be clear

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways

Sketch made during the interview as Jenn described what kind of device she needed.

Over the course of the meeting we discussed different types of actions that Jen would like to be able to do better. Specifically, we talked about her difficulty with activities like food prep and self-care. From both of these topics, we learned that Jen has the most trouble with actions meant for hands. She currently has no real method of applying things like make-up to her face without a fair amount of effort, if at all. In addition, her current method for cutting vegetables and other foods involves holding a knife in her mouth and leaning over to cut the vegetables with head motions. While she is able to provide enough force to cut through most vegetables, she cannot cut and hold the vegetable at the same time. Despite the relative success that Jen might have at modifying tasks meant for hands, she expressed much interest in a device that could make these modifications much more efficient. From the conversation topics, it was also clear that helping with food prep is very important to her as it is the only part of the cooking process in which she can safely be involved.

Our Thoughts

The meeting went pretty smoothly. We got along well, and our discussions got pretty deep. When the discussions stagnated, we used the agenda more like a reference, effectively keeping the conversation going. Something that we should’ve delved further in during our conversation was discussing the details of Jenn’s range of motion. We had assumed after our discussion that she could use at least one hand, until we watched the video she sent, which showed that she instead used her mouth to do tasks. We wish we asked more questions about how much dexterity she has with maneuvering things with her mouth.