As of this week we’re officially Team FunRaiser, and we’re beginning to dig in deeper to our project and understand the task ahead of us.

We met virtually with our liaison at the Cade Museum, Ellie Thom, to introduce ourselves and talk about the project. Also attending this meeting was Carmen Hurtado, the Cade Museum Senior Product Development Manager. Carmen is the overhead manager of this project at the Cade Museum, and she’ll be working with us in the coming year, too. Ellie currently resides on the west coast, so Carmen will be our local contact when we’re actually checking out the museum.

After everyone was introduced, we jumped into talking about specifications for our project. The team had written up a Scope of Work document based on initial communication about the project, but being able to speak with Ellie and Carmen really helped us understand more details: what content needs to be included as part of the machine, the constraints for the machine and why, and what will be up to the discretion of our team during the design process. We had a lot of questions to ask Ellie and Carmen, and surprisingly we got through them all!

With a better understanding of the task in front of us, we began codifying some of the important details of our project, namely our primary stakeholders and our project design specifications. With these details in place, we’ll be able to design an interactive machine using the proper steps of the engineering process. In other words, nailing down these design specifications will help us make the best (and coolest) donation machine while still perfectly fitting the Cade space! Our next steps involve finalizing these details, so we can get to one of the most fun parts of the design process: brainstorming!