SOMEWHAT A BLURRY WEEK
The week started with presentations on the design context review. The presentations started a bit late and most of the invited guests didn't show up because they had to attend to other stuff. We presented on all our team projects. We got feedback from both the TAs and Maureen from NEST 360. The feedback was both positive and negative, this was to improve our skills. Later in the afternoon we had an introduction to how we write the design criteria and we had a presentation on that too.
On Tuesday, we continued working on the design criteria for our projects. For some of them, we had to utilize user-defined scales to quantify the criteria before ranking them. We also did an exercise from the book to further our understanding of the concept of design criteria. We gave a presentation on it in the afternoon. After completing the task we were briefed on the solution stage, which is the second stage of the engineering design process.
On wednesday we then had to decompose or breakdown our projects in blocks. This was done to help us brainstorm our solutions. The rest of the day was all about brainstorming the solutions and this was a wild experience since we were going as crazy as we could. Thursday was a continuation of brainstorming and then in the afternoon we had an activity on scoring matrices. This is to help us evaluate our solutions so that we come up with the best solution to be taken into prototyping and we had to video record our presentation, another interesting thing.
Friday, there was a workshop by Dzuka Africa Organisation by Dineo Mkwezalama and Cuthbert on entrepreneurship. This was quite an experience, there was a lot of interaction, coming up with business ideas that actually solve problems not just the symptomes and also writing the vision and the mission statements of the business ideas. This helped me see beyond what I normally see in terms of business/investments. We had one on one meetings with the Dzuka team and this was great because I got feedback based on my business, vision and mission. It was my much needed workshop.
Overall, the week was great even though I wasn't feeling well most of the week, I learnt a lot of things I must say. Looking forward to prototyping and more learning