Molly Farison
molly.farison@gmail.com
  • Work Experience
    • Resume
    • Lilypad work details
    • Altaeros work details
    • NASA work details
  • Technical Projects
    • Lilypad Scale
    • Concussion Detector
    • Microgrid Research
    • Connected Bicycle
    • FPGA Music Visualizer
    • Sonar System
    • Project Wizard Software Tool
    • Automated Guitar Tuner
  • Design Projects
    • Lilypad Scale Design
    • Designing New Tools for Lung Cancer
    • Designing for Parents and Educators of Visually Impaired Children
    • Redesigning Ironing for Sustainability
  • Portfolio Summary
  • Environmental Activism
  • Engineering Education

User-Oriented Design of the Lilypad Scale

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What? 
Using a user-oriented co-design process, I led product design of the Lilypad Scale for manual wheelchairs in conjunction with several wheelchair users.
Why? 
Integrating the feedback and ideas of potential customers into the design of a new product helps ensure that initial customers will be satisfied with the product and feel that it meets their needs. 
How?
Using skills from the User-Oriented Collaborative Design class at Olin College (the class that the original idea for the home wheelchair scale came from), I tested each new iteration of the scale design with wheelchair users. I created and asked them to evaluate looks-like and feels-like prototypes for both the scale and the handheld readout. I integrated their ideas on the fly to make new looks-like and feels-like prototypes and get their feedback on those too. I integrated feedback from these potential customers with technical constraints to make decisions about product features and design priorities. This collaborative co-design process led us to produce a product that has multiple 5-star reviews on Amazon. To learn more about the product that came out of this process, visit lilypadscales.com.

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