Done! (for now)
Team Far Out powering through the last stretch of Spring semester.
As we alluded to in our previous post, we made yet another pivot just before our final sprint of the semester. Through further conversations with NASA engineers, we identified teams operating on different assumptions when approaching designs to be a trouble-maker when it comes to milestone reviews. When teams are not communicating how they are designing a part or what tools will be used, they might find out later that what they’ve spent months of energy working on cannot integrate with each other. This can lead to “massive rework” (a quote from an engineer we interviewed), causing delays and affected other team’s progress because of the interrelationships between teams/disciplines at NASA.
…which led to our current project focus:
How might we ensure design assumptions are aligned leading up to milestone reviews?
With the new and narrowed focus, we began ideating around strategies that could help answer this “How might we” question, and we came up with two main directions: 1) foster collaborative design process and 2) facilitate communication about changes, updates and discrepancies across teams.
To maximize our productivity, we split up into two sub-teams to each tackle a theme. After our initial round of sketching, we held a session to share our prototypes and thought process behind them.
The design regroup was very helpful in getting everyone on the same page with meaningful feedback. However, we realized that even within the team we had rather different perspectives. Instead of trying to consolidate the two diverging prototypes, we decided to define the core elements that will be in our solutions: we organized a list of features that we think would be most helpful, and will be running a round of test for them first. By isolating the features, we want to get targeted feedback on the usefulness of our solution, instead of distracting our users with the layout of different modules.
Apart from time on project…
As we added more details to the features, we were also busy preparing our Spring presentation, which covers the work we did over the semester — how our research led to insights and how we developed our design concepts.
During our last week of classes, we presented to our faculty and peers.
Within 24 hours after the presentation, we packaged and submitted all deliverables (our project website, the set of features we are bring to test in the summer, along with a test plan). Having been working on a prompt of helping NASA engineers getting to “done” for the past few months, we are now officially DONE for Spring (!!)
In two weeks, we will be moving to Mountain View to continue our summer work at NASA’s Ames Research Center. This time, we are really going far out! We’ll miss our friends in Pittsburgh dearly, but we’re also stoked to enjoy some Cali sunshine ☀️ Stay tuned, we’ll have 4x the time to spend on capstone!
We are 5 MHCI students at Carnegie Mellon University, currently working on our capstone project, where we work with NASA to help engineers understand being “done” in building the Space Launch System (SLS). We will be taking turns to write about our research activities and insights, design decisions and how we navigate through ambiguity in general.
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