Challenge III¶
Choosing what to work on¶
In this challenge, when we were shaping what to work on, we went in between doing something completely different based on what we learnt in the last semester, or continuing to work on our previous prototypes and integrating them further with the relevant learnings.
We chose to continue on the previous prototypes considering the little time that was left in the semester and we couldn’t risk opening a new box - we’ve already understood in previous challenges that even when you think something will be straightforward forward when you dive into it, there are always peculiar challenges that you cannot predict beforehand. A good example of this was when we built the Vortex in the first challenge, we thought we’d be done in half a day, but it took us 3 days to make it work, understand its physics, 3d print a head to the motor, and build a base for the container.
A lot of progress¶
This time was no exception, and we had to work really hard to complete some tasks we had planned previous to the challenge. The improvements are listed in our repo as well as the documentation of the end product. https://github.com/ramiroarga/Microchallenge-3
Challenging ourselves first¶
What was great about this challenge was that we have a relatively thorough deep-dive on the proposed projects of the teams, which I personally really enjoyed. Our faculty challenged us to think critically about what we wanted to do, and why, which made the process beautiful in my opinion. I think it’s what tech education should be like. Making sure our artefacts are aligned with our values and the stories we want to tell with them.
In our case, we were challenged on why we’re using electric pumps in our device, and introducing technology that may not be required. It made us reconsider our design decisions, and we actually implemented one of the pumps as a manual one, and left the other electric due to automating some tasks that we believe users would not want to deal with, thus increasing the adoption possibility of our prototype.
Low-tech vs. High-tech¶
This gave us a change to compare and contrast 2 different types of pumps as well, and having worked and implemented the electronic one, I can say that manual pump is much more tangible, fun to use and engaging for users, whereas the electronic one, despite our best efforts will probably become a black box for many users because it’s tedious and is not in the human-scale like the manual one. The maintenance for the electronic one will be much harder for users, and we need to make it more reliable and sturdy before giving it out to people to use it in the field.
The other problem is how you get the energy you need to run the electric pump. In our case we used a 5V mobile phone charger battery to make it possible to use the most wide-spread resource possible and make it work off-the-grid, but it still requires users to have a battery there, that needs to be charged from time to time, etc. Overall, given the experience, I think finding a way to use manual pumps across the whole system would be a much better solution if this device is going to be an off-the-grid, mobile water solution.
Challenges for life?¶
I’ve learnt a lot in this challenge, and experienced once again how much more you can progress when there’s focused time with a certain deadline compared to our regular working scheme. I wish there was a way to continue doing challenges like this after the program. Hey Fablab, can we meet every 3 months to do challange weeks like this to build solutions for our challenges after the master?
Thanks so much to everyone who supported our projects in these challenges!