This week was a busy, yet exciting week for our team. After having run through our Preliminary Design Report (PDR) presentation in class last week, we were focused on our final PDR presentation to Newell Brands this week. On Monday, we had the pleasure of presenting our PDR to our liaison engineers and some of the leadership for Newell Brands. We loved being able to share our ideas and concept generation with everyone. We dedicated lots of time and effort to this project and presentation, so we were extremely excited when it came time to give the actual PDR presentation over Microsoft Teams.  

In addition to our PDR presentation, this week we focused on product testing. We have been working diligently to gather as much data and perform as much research as possible. Each member of the team has individually been testing and conducting their own research. Our next phase is reverse engineering. We are excited to get our hands on the products Newell Brands sent us last week and start to break down the machines into their components to understand how each machine works. We are excited to continue testing and reverse engineering in the coming weeks! This is going to have a huge impact on our first prototype and overall design of our project. Here’s a video we found to help us understand the importance of reverse engineering! 

We’ve reached the halfway point of semester one of IPPD! Our team worked hard to complete the Preliminary Design Report and compile its content into a concise presentation for Newell Brands next week! The report captures all of our progress thus far, including our in depth analysis on the scope of work, extensive research through our literature review, and the beginning stages of concept generation. After receiving valuable feedback from our peers and project coaches, we have implemented several changes in the presentation, and are looking forward to putting our best foot forward in next week’s presentation.

In even more exciting news, all of our requests from Newell Brands, as well as our ingredient orders have officially arrived safely in our locker. After designing a series of experiments, we are super excited to get started with testing, with the hopes of answering those crucial questions that we formed in our initial concept generation phase! Additionally, next week we will shift our focus to dissecting the Mr. Coffee products we received. By reverse engineering a wide variety of beverage makers, our team will develop a stronger understanding of the inner mechanisms, both mechanical and electrical, of these household products. This will make a huge impact on our designs as we progress through the concept generation phase.

Experimentation and Reverse Engineering

This week the majority of our products from Newell Brands have arrived! We have begun to layout our plans for reverse engineering the products. To facilitate we’ve split our group in two parts:

Mechanical analysis (Leah, Brandon, Oriana, Samantha)
Electrical analysis (Angelique, Julian, Vincent).

In addition we have switched over to using Trello as Team 7’s planning tool. This will improve our productivity and help us stay organized over the next two semesters.

Finally our team has started to gather the necessary components and equipment to start experimentation next week in the IPPD lab. This includes some products we ordered online and various lab tools we will borrow from UF facilities.

Concept generation and Experimentation!

This week has been full of concept generation and planning for our testing phase. After creating several concepts for our product and discussing them, we realized that there are so many questions that can only be solved through first-hand experimentation.

Further propelling our testing phase, we received packages from our sponsor! We are eager to start reverse engineering these items and incorporating what we learn into our product design.

To compliment our research and experimentation, we are exploring the laboratory resources available to us as IPPD students and preparing the space for us to get started! We’ve also completed our First Month Report, Gantt chart, and project roadmap to monitor our progress and ensure that we are staying on schedule throughout this process.

Bonus! This week we received our professional head shots, courtesy of IPPD.

This week was a busy yet successful time for Team 7! The theme of the week was individual concept generation. We wanted to focus our week on how we each thought the process and prototype should work and what components we thought were essential. So, this week was a time of brainstorming and concept generation so that next week, we can pitch our ideas and processes to each other and make a weighted matrix to help us decide on the best components for our prototype. We are excited to pitch our ideas to each other and see them come to fruition so soon!

We have also been working diligently on our two assignments due next week, the project roadmap and the Project First Month Report. These assignments have helped us project manage our design process well and they have given us perspective in terms of what is expected from us as a team and deadlines we must meet. We also appreciate that we can complete these assignments to help us understand our project and what is expected of us more in depth. We’ve learned about a variety of concepts in class and now we’re able to put them to use and showcase this all in our Project First Month Report.

We also met with our coach, Dr. Jackson, who provided us with a ton of tips, tricks, guidance, and feedback for the concept generation process. We are excited to continue the design process and have our ideas come to life!

This week was a very exciting week for the team as we started working on our concept generation process. Every member of the team had time to write down some different design ideas regardless of how big or how small the idea was. This was a great way for all of us to initially get out the ideas we’ve formed since learning about the project, but also discover new questions and ideas that we hadn’t thought about. We are very excited to continue working on this! 

At the beginning of the week, we submitted our Product Design Specifications which assessed the needs and specifications of the project. This proved very helpful when the time came to start generating concepts. We presented this to our coach and got his feedback to make the document stronger and more thorough. We also met as a team to select Newell Brands products that we would like to use to reverse engineer to help us with making our specialty drink maker.  

We also had our first presentation this week, presenting our name, logo, and how they relate to our project. We received some feedback on our logo and made a few edits to it. 

This week we focused on forming a deeper understanding of the processes involved in making our specialty beverage maker as well as setting the groundwork for our team’s project management style. In terms of researching, we experimented with making the specialty beverage at home. This gave us insight into the different factors such as temperature, time, and ingredient measurements that affect the final product. Our research also included looking into current Newell Brands products that could provide a reference point for our future designs.  

We took a deeper look at the stakeholders in our project. These groups were important to keep in mind as we filled out our Product Design Specifications because identifying your stakeholders helps in differentiating between needs and wants.   

We ended the week with a meeting with our liaisons, updating them on our progress. They were excited about our team logo and name!

This week was one of many “firsts” for our team. We had our first meeting as a design team, our first look at our project’s Scope of Work, and our first meetings with both our faculty advisor and corporate liaisons from Newell Brands. Beyond this, we brainstormed and agreed on a team name: Simplici-tea. From here we’re looking forward to researching our project further and collaborating with our liaisons to understand the work we have ahead of us before beginning the design process.