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Recap of Week 9: Concluding the Internship

  By Rhodes Coffey • August 3, 2009

For the final week of our internship, we were racing to the finish–trying to get everything done just in time. Our to-do list was quite lengthy at the start of the week, but we managed to accomplish everything by the end.

On Monday, we met at the MFAH to make final precise measurements of the art pieces and take some more pictures. To start off Tuesday, we scheduled out the rest of the week so that everything would get done. We attended the weekly Center for Civic Engagement fellows meeting where we learned the specifics of giving a good PowerPoint or poster presentation from Dr. Deborah Barrett, Director of the Program for Communication Excellence. The Cain Project, established at Rice University, is a great source of information on this topic and can be utilized to find poster templates. Although all of us feel comfortable giving exceptional presentations due to years of experience, this presentation about presentations was a good refresher.

The remainder of Tuesday was primarily spent sending out orders for supplies. We ordered supplies from Regal Plastics Inc., McMaster Carr online, The Strap Store of Houston, and a couple of other sources.

On Wednesday, we received some of our structural framing materials and began making test frames. As part of the iteration process of our prototyping, we realized that a few parts were not sufficient for our designs and decided to modify one of our orders. We also made test silicone molds in the Wet Lab, leaving ample time for these to set. A large portion of the day was also spent working on the business plan for our Innovation Norway class. By the end of Wednesday, the business plan for ArtArmor had been masterfully completed, including sections for executive summary, product overview, market analysis, marketing strategy, critical risks, and the company management. That afternoon, Caleb picked up the plastics order from Regal Plastics and Rhodes retreived the order of straps.

By Thursday, more and more materials were pouring into the Design Kitchen. We continued to test the framing components and assess what materials were still needed. Caleb worked on the plaster and mold for the Head of a Child piece, Nicole created the hanger element for History Dress # 1, Kristi formed the mold for the bottom of The Bronco Buster, and Rhodes planned out design dimensions for all of the pieces using CAD. We also spent some time designing the poster for our project.

Before heading to class, Rhodes and Caleb worked on elevator pitches for ArtArmor, LLC. These 90 second pitches were then presented before the entire class and a partner from the DFJ Mercury venture capitalist firm. Both elevator pitches included humorous and informative components that were well-received by the rest of the class and instructors. During the remainder of the class, Ned Hill, Managing Director of DFJ Mercury, presented on every possible detail of term sheets.

Friday, the last day of July, marked the final day of the internship and it turned out to be the busiest of the entire 9 weeks. The epic day consisted of cutting and polishing the framing beams, cutting the sides and bottoms to size, creating the final silicone molds, and finally building our housing solution prototypes. We all utilized the machine shop and tools to finalize the prototypes. A few more final materials were picked up as the building progressed. Our final solutions will be unveiled at a later date, but for now we are quite proud of the ultimate outcomes of our project. After a long last day spent at the Design Kitchen, we celebrated the conclusion of our internship. The endless hours of research, hundreds of ideas, and weeks spent designing modular housing solutions for the MFAH’s art pieces had surmised into impressive prototypes. This is not the end, however, as we will be presenting our work this Fall and our endeavors will be wrapped into the class taught this Fall semester by Dr. Wettergreen. Although the summer internship has ended for EDAAC, you will definitely be hearing more from us in the future.

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Recap of Week 8

  By Kristi Day • July 24, 2009

On Monday, we began to make final decisions about materials and vendors for these materials. We spent a lot of time researching different suppliers online, and pricing different products. During this process, we realized that there were a lot of details about how our designs worked that we hadn’t yet decided on. This slowed down the process of selecting to what to buy, since we weren’t really sure how to make these decisions. We learned that there is less certainty in engineering design than we had originally thought. We continued this research on Tuesday, and also called different companies to gain more information about their products and services.

The Technology Entrepreneurship Workshop ran from Wednesday to Thursday, and was a 2 day “boot-camp” for people who are interested in starting their own businesses. The workshop not only involved the members of our Innovation Norway course, but also members of the community. The course covered everything from how to give an elevator pitch to how to write and business plan, and how to gain the interest of investors like venture capitalists and angel investors.

On Friday, we took a trip to Lowe’s in order to get a better idea of what different parts looked like in real life, since we had been looking at everything online. It was nice to be able to see what the different pieces of hardware were called and more specifically how they worked. Then, in order to increase our work efficiency, we divided up the tasks. Caleb and Rhodes went to Regal Plastics to check out the different options they had available, and Kristi and Nicole stayed behind and worked on finalizing the shopping list for materials.

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Recap of Thursday

  By Caleb Brown • July 16, 2009

After spending a restless night in our tent at the Chick-fil-A in Port Arthur, we took our 52 free meals and headed for home. Since we did not get back to the Rice campus until 8:00 AM, we decided to start work at ten o’clock to give us time to prepare for the intense day ahead. We arrived at the Design Kitchen feeling clean, renewed, and ready for anything.

Our fist task was to complete each Pugh Analysis for the four individual pieces that we started at the beginning of the week. This analysis consisted of numerically evaluating nearly 150 ideas, using evaluation criteria we created specifically to illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of each storage design. Once it was complete, we used the numerical valuation of each idea to narrow the available options down to a top ten for each piece.

After we finished the Pugh Analysis, we had to make haste and delegate tasks in order to meet the needs of the demanding day. Caleb revised and edited a powerpoint presentation for a meeting with Julie Bakke and Wynne Phelan of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Nicole and he had created the bulk of the presentation earlier in the week for the Center for Civic Engagement meeting, but the new version was tailored to give deeper insight into our process.

Rhodes had a very challenging task of finishing the financial projections portion of the business plan for the Innovation Norway Course. This document includes the assumptions we made that provided the basis for our financial projections. Some of categories include revenue, expenses, and earnings before interest and tax. Our financial projection section also included graphs of units sold per year and trends of the categories mentioned above.

While Rhodes and Caleb attended the weekly Innovation Norway class, Kristi and Nicole stayed at the Design Kitchen to push forward in the solution phase. Earlier, each person in the team picked two ideas they liked best, regardless of the Pugh Analysis, and start a new idea pot. Each person then added the two best designs from each top ten list to the pot. Nicole and Kristi took the new idea pot and explored the possibilities of each idea. They combined the best features of different ideas and created concepts with full functionality. Kristi masterfully drew pictures of each concept, seven in all.

With the powerpoint ready and the seven concepts drawn, it was time to meet with Chief Registrar, Julie Bakke and Director of Conservation, Wynne Phelan of MFAH. Rhodes and Caleb gave the presentation, and Nicole and Kristi discussed each design. We were very pleased at how well the designs were received by Julie and Wynne! We left at six o’clock with high hopes from their encouragement and enthusiasm of our ideas.

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Recap of Monday and Tuesday

  By Nicole Garcia • July 14, 2009

On Monday, we did an initial Pugh Analysis of all of our designs to weight its possible use for the team selected piece La soriddez. In order to do a Pugh Analysis, we first came up with some evaluation criteria. These criteria are important in the storage for the piece and are features that we think the final solution should include. Examples of some of our criteria include: breathability, visibility, ease of use, and contact with piece. Then setting the original packing solution as a baseline for the analysis we rated each design with a 1, 0, or -1, as respectively being better, the same, or worse than the current solution in the evaluation criteria.  From this, we were able to eliminate many of the weaker designs from the pool of possible ideas. Once this was completed, we broke up into teams of two and completed an initial Pugh Analysis of all the designs for possible use for our individual pieces. The initial analysis was very labor intensive as about 200 designs had to be analyzed for each of the five pieces.

Today, the team spent some time working on a presentation for our CCE meeting. In this presentation, we included who was on the team, what our goals for the summer were, some of our daily activity, and what must be done to complete many of our goals (including the Pugh Analysis).

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Recap of Week 6

  By Kristi Day • July 10, 2009

We started this week by taking another look at our key components spreadsheet, and making sure that all our viable ideas from our note cards were represented. We printed out copies of our spreadsheet, and used them to help us in our next step of the brainstorming process.

We then began to do more note card style brainstorming, this time coming up with more complete ideas, and having our specific art pieces in mind. We referenced our spreadsheet to make sure we addressed all the different design blocks. Each of us came up with very different ideas, since our pieces have a wide-range of needs. We each came up with 15 ideas during this step, and presented our ideas to the others when we were finished, as well as to Dr. Matthew Wettergreen and Grace Rodriguez, who gave us valuable feedback to help us with our ideas.

For our next step, we once again came up with 15 ideas, but this time we focused on modularity and general solutions, rather than solutions tailored to our specific pieces. We still focused on utilizing our design blocks, but the ideas that we generated were very different from the previous round. After this round of brainstorming, we went through our spreadsheet to make sure every design idea had been used at least once. We wrote a list of the ideas that hadn’t been used yet, and referenced this list during our next round, in which we once again generated 15 ideas each.

Before attending our Innovation Norway class on Thursday, we needed to have a rough draft of a market analysis section for our business plan assignment. We did some further research about museums in the United States, and made use of the research we had already done for our Design Analysis Phase Report, in which we extensively examined companies that offer similar products. We also did a final push in our brainstorming, each coming up with 3 realistic ideas that focused on modularity and the use of silicone.

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Recap of Week 5

  By Kristi Day • July 3, 2009

This week, we started our first round of brainstorming. On Monday, we did a warm-up exercise by brainstorming a team name. We thought of a lot of different ideas, from inno-crate to texo-skeleton. We had a time limit on our brainstorming, but we hadn’t chosen a final name yet, so we quickly combined all our ideas into ARTadillo-Inno-Crate-a-Pod. At a later time, we researched which of our name ideas were already company names, in order to narrow our options. Our final decision was ArtArmor.

Our next step was to start brainstorming ideas for our actual project. We each got a stack of 100 blank note cards, and had one hour to write an idea on each one. The ideas didn’t have to be complete or realistic, but we did have to fill out all 100 cards. We then color coded our cards to indicate who came up with each idea, and shuffled them together in a complete stack. Then we each took a section of the stack and read through the ideas, and wrote any additional ideas that we generated.

On Tuesday, we took all our 500 note cards and taped them up on the glass walls of the conference room in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK). Initially, we taped all of them up in random order. Then, we re-organized them into four categories: materials, features, concepts, and geometry. We then broke these down further into more detailed categories. This enabled us to find overlaps in our brainstorming, and access our ideas more easily.

Once we had organized all our ideas, we went through the different categories and tried to brainstorm any more ideas that we could, if we thought of something that was missing. We also looked for trends in our categories that would become our “design blocks.” The intial design blocks were outside shape, interface with object, human interaction, and technologies. These were later broken down into more specific categories, and a materials aspect was added, as we compiled all our ideas into a key componets spreadsheet.

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Brainstorming 301

  By Rhodes Coffey • July 1, 2009

For the third round of brainstorming, we consolidated our ideas into more solidified categories. Each of the subcategories were unified and strengthed by tying similar ideas together. Similar ideas were further consolidated by making sure that the ideas did not overlap into multiple categories and that similar index cards were stacked on top of each other. Next, the ideas were tied to the design objectives as detailed in the comprehensive design analysis phase report. In reassessing the design objectives, we elaborated on the current objectives and insured that the original objectives covered everything. We then dedicated more time to brainstorming specific ideas about how each design objective can be met. Those additional ideas that spawned from concentrated brainstorming of the design objectives were then added to the collection of ideas by category. Next, we focused on the key components of our storage solution. These components are the necessary elements that our solution cannot do without and include the categories: interface with object, human interaction, shape/form, and technologies. We created several idea maps to visually display the key components and each physical element related to each component. From here, we can more easily visualize our options and potential ideas to follow through with in the design phase.

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Brainstorming 201

  By Kristi Day • June 30, 2009

After brainstorming 500 ideas on note cards, in order to productively access our ideas, we needed to organize them.  Before we could organize them, however, we needed to be able to see all of them. We chose the biggest conference room in the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) for our pallet. All the walls are glass windows, so we taped all our note cards onto the wall so that we could see them all at once. Once the walls were completely covered in note cards, we needed to categorize them to reduce confusion. We read through the cards to look for common themes that could become categories. We initially built four categories: materials, features, concepts, and geometry.

These four categories were still fairly daunting, so we did a further breakdown of each category into more specified sections. Within the materials category, we divided the cards into smaller groups of types of materials, such as metals, fluids, and foams. For the features, we determined that some of the cards indicated specific parts, like different styles of handles, while others were possible features, like temperature monitoring. The concepts section was broken down into cards that suggested building off of a specific existing concept, or new ideas that could stand alone. For the geometry category, we first made a section of the different possible outside shapes, like a sphere or pyramid. In the remaining cards, we saw groups of different ways to interface with the art piece, such as through suspension, anchoring, or nesting.

Adding these more specified sub categories made it possible for us to view our ideas in an organized matter. It also enabled us to find cards that repeated similar ideas. When we found those cards, we stacked them on top of each other, so that we weren’t throwing out any cards, but we were paring the field in order to have a more concise group to work from. We also made an important extra category: the ridiculous category. We didn’t dispose of outrageous ideas, but set them aside, so that inspiration could still be drawn from them.

For more pictures of our brainstorming session, please visit our Flickr page.

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Recap of Week 4

  By Nicole Garcia • June 26, 2009

The main goal of week four was to refine and complete our design and analysis phase report. All of Monday was dedicated to this report.
On Tuesday, we had an extended meeting at the MFAH with Julie Bakke and Wynne Phelan. During this meeting they answered most of the remaining questions needed to complete our report. These questions were about the specifics of our piece selections. They related to us materials that absolutely could not be used in our storage device as well as some materials that would be preferred or acceptable. After this they took us to see all of the pieces. We then took further data as to the structural dimensions of each piece and determined approximate weight and materials. We also discussed more specifically the concerns related to each piece and the history behind the art.

Tuesday afternoon, we attended the weekly Center for Civic Engagement Fellows meeting. At this meeting, Dr. Stephen Klineberg spoke about “The Changing Face of Houston.”
On Wednesday, we compiled the information we received from the MFAH and incorporated it into the report. In the afternoon, Anthony Locastro and Ben Esquivel gave us a tour of 360 Art Services. 360 Art Services is an art packing and crating company in Houston. It is currently one of the companies that is being used by the MFAH. On this tour we received an inside look at how some pieces of art are being stored for transport. Because the pieces come in all different shapes and sizes 360 must consider each piece separately and listen to the needs of their client to properly customize a crate and safely ship each piece. 360 uses a variety of archivally-safe materials and their crates are currently a recognizable red with the 360 logo.

360 Art Services

360 Art Services

On Thursday, we had a question and answers meeting with Dr. Corey Rogge, of the Rice University Chemistry Department, where she answered the remainder of our questions. All of these questions were very specific to the materials that our pieces are each made out of and how these materials degrade, outgass, are conserved, and effect other materials around them. Dr. Rogge also gave us some historical accounts about the science of conservation. It is interesting to note that much was learned from the opening of King Tutankhamun tomb in Egypt by observing how those ancient artifacts had been preserved for centuries underground.

Thursday afternoon, we attended our second Innovation Norway Entrepreneurship class. During this class we recapped reading from The Innovators Dilemma and The Art of the Start. After the recap, Michael Lowe, President and CEO of OrthoAccel Technologies Inc., gave a presentation on the history of his startup company and how they are reaching for success. Along with his history he gave helpful advice as to how to organize and start your own business based on solid ideas and good communication.

Friday, James Springer, of the Library Services Center, gave us a tour of the off site storage for Rice’s Fondren Library collection. They have a modular storage system organized by size. Every book and box is barcoded and shelved. Their storage is climate controlled and all of the books are stored in custom built acid free cardboard shelving units. This storage system has proved to be very efficient and space saving, and is the type of storage Julie Bakke has relayed to us that she would like for the museum.

Rice Library Service Center Storage

Rice Library Service Center Storage