The project objective is to design an assistive device for our client with physical difficulties. On Mar. 21, 2022, we held a short interview with our client, Haleigh, on the ground floor of Hunt Library; the talk gave us a chance to better understand Haleigh’s daily life, interests, difficulties, and some of her expectations towards a device that could make her life colorful. We also discussed some of our initial ideas and dived into details that specifically fit our client’s needs.

Interview With Haleigh

Agenda

1. Greetings and Self-introduction

We started our interview with a short self-introduction. It’s not in a very formal form as we already know each other in the project launch class in the previous week. We basically start with a short greeting outside the Hunt Library, talk about some activities before coming to this interview, and walk together into the open classroom located on the ground floor.

2. Project Introduction

After sitting down, we provided an overview of this project; we stated that our goal is to make a prototype of an assistant device for Haleigh within the 6-week timeframe; we also clarified that the project is an explorative one rather than a well-crafted commercial one. Before starting the interview, we asked our client and her mom if we could record our conversation and take photos during our conversion, and they agreed.

3. Understanding Needs

We started the interview by talking about our client’s routine daily life. We acknowledged that she’s interested in painting and reading during the conversation, and she also likes the wordle game. Our client and her mom also told us there are many difficulties in everyday life, like lacking grip and twisting on her hand, limited vision, and needing help when eating due to the posture problem. One of our members also holds Haleigh’s hand under consent to see how much grip she has.

4. Random Chat

The fourth part of the interview is a random chat. We don’t have preset topics but just started with a general question of what was a memorable thing in her life. The conversation was going freely; everyone on the table joined the talk and shared many exciting things like culture, favorite weather, and daily life, not just Haleigh talking and we listening aside. The random chat made us understand our client better and gave us a more vivid image of our client. There are occasional silent moments during the conversation, but we all tried to bring up new topics and make the talk continue.

5. Conclusion and Appreciation

The conversation lasted about 45 minutes. We appreciated our client’s time coming for this interview and her patience in answering our questions. Haleigh also told us she’s happy that have someone listening to her. In the end, we told them that instead of doing a one-time interview, we regard this meeting as a starting point so that we can keep in touch with our client through text when we have ideas or further questions. And we will send her our product at the end of this semester if possible.

Interview Notes

Summary / Takeaways

The interview provided us with a better understanding of our client; we got to know her daily life and interests and found some important points related to Haleigh’s difficulty that repeatedly appeared during the conversation.

1. Grip issue

The grip issue, and twist issue on Haleigh’s two hands cause one of the major inconveniences in her everyday life. She couldn’t drink easily because of lack of grip; we found it was her mom holding the cup for her and using a straw for drinking water. Our client also mentioned she likes pizza and steak, but she couldn’t cut them because of the grip issue and some twisting difficulties on her wrist; that means carrying and using any utensils is a heavy task for our clients. The same issue also limited her chance to work on her interests like painting, due to the problem of holding pens, brushes, or some similar tools.

Hearing this, we discussed the possibility of creating a device that integrates daily tools like utensils; it doesn’t need a lot of grip or precise gestures to use. One of our members held both of Haleigh’s hands under her and her mom’s consent and found that the amount of grip was good. Haleigh’s mom also showed us the gesture that Haleigh holds things most easily, and we took a photo of that pose. Thus we have empirical information on Haleigh’s grip and twist issue and enable us to work toward our client’s specific needs.

Gesture of Holding Things

Untensil Device Sketch

2. Skin issue

When talking about our favorite weather, our client said that she likes sunny days with a smile on her face. She doesn’t like cloudy days because she always like to stay outside and enjoy the sunshine and fresh air. But her mom mentioned that she couldn’t stay outside too long becase the solar radiation would hurt her skin and harm her eyes. We noticed that when hearing that the sunlight was “bad” to her, Haleigh’s face turned a little sad. We don’t want her deprived of the chance to enjoy the great weather and outdoor activities, so we arose another idea of designing a sun angle responsive “umbrella” on our client’s chair that can block the solar radiation when staying outside. This might need heavier engineering, but we kept it as one of our project directions.

Responsive Shading Sketch

Reflection

The meeting followed the agenda very well, we started the conversation smoothly and it went pretty well. Although there were some silence in that short 45 minutes, we all tried to drop new topics and keep the conversation going. Our client was so nice, trying to answer our questions in detail and sharing many exciting moments in her life. We are also impressed by Haleigh’s optimism and shinny smiles.

The interview was also productive; we got important information from our client like her interests, difficulties, and some expectations. With this knowledge, we can design a device that meets her needs better.

Team Callisto had the opportunity to speak with Mary D’Ottavio to design an assistive device for Mary’s daily life. Through the Ideate: Physical Computing course at CMU we were able to meet with Mary and ask her about how she navigates her life with her physical disabilities. The Team consisting of Sumayya, Yongwen, Juan and Tristan held multiple interviews with Mary to really understand what type of device would benefit her. On Wednesday, March 23 Mary told the team about her love for sports, writing, card collecting and emphasized some issues regarding accessing items that are far out of reach. After some brainstorming, the team decided to meet with Mary again on March 27 to go over their ideas and designs for another brainstorming session. 

Agenda:

Interview 1:

1. General introduction of the team and Mary
2. Thank for Mary for taking the time to do the interview, and ask what encouraged to join the project
3. Briefly explain project and establish the expectations we have
4. Ask what she does in daily life (try to branch off of the reason she joined the project)
5. Ask about hobbies
6. Ask about difficulties she has in her daily life
7. Ask about if she has any ideas for projects
8. Brainstorm some potential solutions to problems that Mary may have mentioned from the last few questions
9. Summarize the meeting
10. Thank Mary for coming and let her know we will keep her updated about our ideas.

Interview 2:

1. Short recap of last meeting, briefly discussing any key takeaways [5-10 Minutes]
2. Discuss any topics/ideas Mary may have thought of since last meeting 
3. Go over our current project ideas [5 minutes per idea, 20 minutes total] 
4. Get feedback from Mary, ideally try to narrow down to 1-2 most appealing ideas
5. Decide whether or not to move forward with one specific project, or to keep brainstorming

Summary and Takeaways:

Through the interviews we learned a lot about Mary’s activities and daily life. We were inspired by her strive to be independent and the many techniques she’s used to do her tasks on her own as much as possible. Although we were happy to learn Mary is very independent, this initially made it difficult to come with solutions that Mary would truly benefit from. It is why our first project idea was a solution to help with difficulties related to physical concerns such as reaching for items at the back of a closet or refrigerator. During the first interview we had discussed solutions to this problem but after a conversation with the professor, we realized our solution was very mechanical. And so, we went back to our notes from the first meeting and held a second interview with Mary. 

During the second interview, we clarified the purpose of the project was to find solutions that involve electronics. We eventually learned that Mary loves to write whenever she gets the chance. We wondered if Mary has difficulty noting ideas that she may randomly think of. As a result we suggested a device that could record notes by the press of a button. This way, Mary doesn’t have to worry about the time and difficulty of typing ideas. Instead, she simply scrolls through her recordings, minimizing hand movement and maximizing her ability to write more stories. 

Images of Mary’s fridge from the first Interview. We wanted to see the layout of her fridge when we were discussing the accessibility problem with items at the far back.

Design inspired from our second interview. This device is a recorder that would help Mary note ideas whenever and wherever.

Thoughts:

The two meetings we had with Mary both went well. Mary is a very positive lady who loves her life so much, which inspires us not only for this assignment but also for our life attitude. We followed the agenda to carry on the meeting and Mary cooperated with us nicely. Unfortunately we could not meet in person for the second interview. But even over the phone, we had a productive discussion about the pros and cons of different project ideas. We appreciated Mary’s honesty and feedback on our ideas as it greatly helped us revise our designs. Since everything went so well, we ended the meeting about 10 minutes earlier than expected. The second meeting was truly productive which made us know better about Mary’s needs and helped us decide on the final design: the voice recorder device. All the team members are very excited about this idea and hope the project goes well and benefits Mary in the future.

For the final project in Physical Computing, we have formed a team of three (Team I/O) in order to create an accessible device for someone with physical disabilities. Our end goal is to create something that is useful and relevant for our client, something driven by her specific wants or needs so she can take home a device unique to her. Our client is Alycia, a blind woman who is also hard of hearing. The purpose of this meeting was threefold: to get to know her and introduce ourselves further, to get to know her wants that would make her life easier, and to get to know her needs – the immediate things that need to be addressed in her life. Present at the meeting was Alycia, Noni, Catherine, and David. It was held over zoom on Monday, March 21st at 10:30am. 

Our Meeting Agenda

The meeting agenda was intentionally loosely structured. We wanted to allow room to run in whichever direction we were taken, while also being able to hear enough of Alycia’s needs and wants to ideate a device that addresses them. Here is what we initially planned:

1. Introductions and icebreaker [everyone answers questions] (5-10mins)
   1. Introduce yourself
   2. Tell us a fun fact 
2. Entering conversation [client answers] (30-40mins)
   1. Why did you volunteer for this project? What was of interest to you?
   2. Do you have any activities in your daily life that are difficult, frustrating, or otherwise seem like they could use an intervention?
   3. What are some activities that you enjoy doing?
   4. What are the main challenges you face that you would want to be addressed?
   5. If you could have anything to improve your daily experience, what would it be?
   6. What’s your daily schedule?
3. Conclusion (2 mins)
   1. Thanking Alycia for her time 
   2. Do you have any questions for us? Or last minute thoughts/things to add?

Meeting Summary and Major Takeaways

We started off the meeting by asking Alycia why she chose to take part in this project, to which she said that she wanted to connect with more people and help raise disability awareness. She also mentioned that there are many products that claim to help people with disabilities, but without actually speaking with one and finding out what they need help with, these products oftentimes cause more harm than good.

We continued this conversation by asking Alycia if there are any activities in her current life that she finds difficult or frustrating. This led to one of our main ideas: a braille-friendly alarm clock. Alycia explained that her current alarm clock is an analog one that connects to a bed shaker. However, it is hard to set the alarm time accurately as she has to feel for the hands’ position while adjusting the clock so it is hard to set the exact time she needs. This often leads to her alarm going off five minutes before she actually wants to wake up. She has also tried talking clocks, but because she is hard of hearing, those don’t work well for her either. Alycia also showed us what her alarm clocks looked like, which we took screenshots of through zoom.

Alycia’s analog alarm clock with two plugs connected to the bed shaker and power source

Example of bed shaker Alycia uses that vibrates when the alarm goes off

Through this, we found that Alycia is a very diligent person who keeps to a strict schedule. Whenever her alarm rings, she gets up immediately and carries out her day, which is why having a well-working alarm clock is very important to her. She also told us she wakes up at 5:30 am every day and we were curious why she did that, so we asked if she could describe what she does in a day. As she was describing her day, she started talking about how she spends a lot of time figuring out how to find directions to her microwave meals.

Because of her debilitating eyesight, she can’t see the box directions and relies on an app to scan the packaging for cooking directions and read it out for her. The app she uses to scan for directions is called Seeing AI, developed by Microsoft. The app is constantly improving and new features are being added, which is very helpful for Alycia Even so, it’s hard for her to position the phone correctly so that the app can see the directions, and she doesn’t know which side the directions are on so she has to continuously rotate the box.

Apart from these two main frustrations, she says that she is able to do most things well and doesn’t need too much help. She spends her days going to class, watching hockey games, playing dice world, and taking care of her cats. There are also many new developing technologies like seeing AI that she finds which greatly help her through her daily activities.

Post-Meeting Thoughts and Reflection

In general, the meeting went very well. We managed to get some good ideas to work with, which was the main goal we had when we entered the interview. Alycia provided us with a clear problem she had right off the bat, allowing us a good starting point, albeit skipping through the initial process of finding what her general life was like and “base scoping” ideas. That being said, it was a bit difficult to get off this initial path once we were on it, and there was a bit of concern that, should this initial idea not work, that we would not have anything to work with. Thus, we tried generalizing the topic more to break away from going down one idea too quickly; we went back to our initial agenda of finding what her life was like, and what she typically did. This allowed us to investigate and find other ideas, like the issue with scanning and packaging. As such, our ideation process went better, though still with concerns that we walked away with only two directions. Further discussion afterwards revealed that we should have asked more about certain details, such as the specifications of the bed shaker, or more about her life in general. This would allow us to explore other ideas to these problems, like wearables as an alternative alarm clock, or entirely different directions, such as something involving her cat or other aspects of her life.