Project Overview

Project Timeline: February 15th - March 31st

Monday-10 Team Portrait

Our project aimed to support Kimberly, a client suffering from Usher’s syndrome, which affects her senses. With her everyday independence in mind, our team developed a kitchen-focused solution. The “Modular Guided Cutting Board” aims to enhance safety and allow for easy usage for Kimberly.

Name	Role
Rebecca	Manager
Brady	Administrator
Iliya	Coordinator
Yumin	Subject Matter Expert
Alberto	Subject Matter Expert

Final Prototype

The Modular Guided Cutting Board includes:

Picket fence-like attachable walls to guide her cuts
Finger guard with protective roof and stabilizing spikes on outer wall
Specialized knife handle to direct the user and securely grip handle
Smooth board </aside>

Our problem statement:

“Kimberly suffers from Usher syndrome limiting her visibility and hearing, she needs a tool that can guide her throughout her daily task. The tool will guide her and facilitate to cut her food such as fruit and vegetables. The design needs to be easy to use, have high contrast, easy to move around, cost-efficient and safe to operate it needs adhere to her visual and hearing loss.”

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Function	Objectives	Metrics	Constraints
Guide her cuts	Accuracy of cuts	Thickness of chopped items (mm)	Easy to visualize (bright colors)
Place and hold food	Ease of use	Tester rating (1-10)	Safety (avoid blade-hand contact)
Remove scrap	Easy to clean	Tester rating (1-10)

Team’s Work and Personal Contributions

Team contribution

Early Identifications

Identified key objectives, metrics, and constraints our design needed to address
Developed a preliminary testing strategy to evaluate how well the design met those requirements
Applied functional analysis to clearly define the purpose of our design and explore possible methods to achieve it.
Our concept was initially inspired by Countertop Bread Slicers typically found in grocer stores, so our team mainly built off that existing solution for our ideas
Iterated feedback from TAs and science students, mainly further tailoring our design for Kimberly
Created decision matrix to find most suitable design alternative based on appropriately weighted objectives </aside>

Countertop Breadslicer

Refined concept sketch for Moving hand guard (By Alberto Silva)

Refined concept sketch for Moving hand guard (By Alberto Silva)

Decision Making and Testing

Compared each group member’s alternative design from decision matrix and ended up continuing project with Moving hand guard alternative
Moving hand guard (now named Modular Guided Cutting Board) was deemed the most feasible design as it focused on safety and a stabile structure and hand guide
Testing plan mainly aimed to simulate how the client would use the design, having five individuals blindfolded cutting food using the design, then rating it based on safety, ease of visualization, ease of use, and ease of cleaning
We added further iterations on the design after feedback from testing, such as the specialized knife handle and adjusted finger guard </aside>

Personal Contributions

Designed and CADed the specialized knife handle
Wrote “Executive Summary”, “Background Information”, “Problem Framing”, and “Conceptual Design” paragraphs in the final report
Provided ideas for testing from research assignment based on the question: “How are products designed for blind people tested?”
Logged every Design Studio, Lab A, and Lab B as the team coordinator
Wrote paragraphs for present and future testing plans in the milestones </aside>

Specialized knife handle

Reflection

Skills

Technical	Location learned	Application
Prototyping	Design Studio	Iterating the design of the Modular Guided Cutting Board throughout the project, adding and removing different features, improving the design overall.

Soft	Application
Teamwork & Collaboration	Collaborated with the team to select a design direction, build the final prototype, prepare the presentation, and complete the final written report.
Flexibility	Adapted quickly to unexpected design issues, made last-minute modifications, and improvised with a limited time schedule.
Problem-solving	Applied critical thinking to improve concepts, create effective testing methods, and assess decision-making

Challenges and Future Iterations

This project taught me the importance of early testing and being adaptable throughout the design process. When we tested our cutting board blindfolded, we realized how difficult it was to use, which led us to redesign the walls with slanted tops. That small change made a huge difference and showed how testing can reveal problems we didn’t anticipate.

Our main challenges was when we used a decision matrix early on to compare our ideas based on our objectives. However, our testing data got wiped due to a Microsoft outage and we had to redo the entire matrix. The outage may have led to a waste of time, but redoing the design matrix led us to second-check some of our weightings and we ended up with a different design choice. This circumstance left me wondering if some setbacks are helpful in design projects and how often they lead to better outcomes? Another challenge we faced was when one of our group members dropped out of Engineering right before we began preparing our final report and presentation. The rest of the group was left to communicate better and take on extra work. I wondered if this unfortunate event, although led to a more stressful end to the project, left us better off as it helped us grow as a group, being in a tough situation and having to work together to complete the project?

Original structure for the Modular Guided Cutting Board walls

Original structure for the Modular Guided Cutting Board walls

Going forward, I’ll put more focus on user feedback and test ideas sooner rather than later. I’ve learned that flexibility is key, especially when unexpected problems come up. I want to continue designing with empathy and make sure the final product works not just in theory, but for the people who actually use it.