Diana Palacios

Reflection: Visualization

Challenge and selection

I am a computer systems engineering student and as a thesis project, my team and I decided  that we wanted to focus our project on creating a useful tool aimed at visually impaired  people, after having carried out research on how in México there aren’t many accessible  tools that can help visually impaired people carry out the activities of their daily lives more  easily and also after having conducted a number of interviews with people that could help  us to have a better understanding of their needs.

Despite the fact that all team members have the same academic background, we all have  different interests in different areas of our major and therefore different approaches to  solving problems: a part of the team is more focused on software development, while the  rest is more interested on hardware development. This was a great area of opportunity for  our project, as it gave us the possibility of having a broader repertoire of possible solutions.

The limitations of our project were based on time: 9 months to complete the project and a  maximum budget of $ 500 usd.

After having done research on the tools that were within our reach to develop the project,  the next step was to think about the possibilities and to reach an agreement on the line that  we were going to follow. To achieve this, we chose the visualization tool, a tool that help us  make ideas tangible and concrete through the use of pictures, diagrams or visuals, since it  was very important for everyone to understand what was inside our minds; as Angela Meyer  said in Module 1, “[…] The more you begin to create a visual image for people of how you  are thinking, the more likely you are to achieve a sense of agreement and consensus with  people”.

Application

We reunited in a room with a white board, where we began to discuss the ideas we had  thought under the premise "What if everything was possible?". From these ideas, we began  to create a diagram with the tools we had in mind (such as development boards,  programming languages, different types of sensors, etc.) and how we could connect them  together.

As we added the tools into the diagram, we started discarding options and coming up with  new ideas, we could also suggest features we hadn’t thought of before that could enhance  the user experience.

Having our ideas visually captured allowed us to expand the possibilities we had in mind  and even expand the scope of our project. Initially we had thought of creating a system that  would have sensors and would allow the user to indicate, from vibratory pulses, that there  was an obstacle nearby.

At the end of our first meeting, one resulting proposal was the creation of a vest with a  network of sensors that would allow the system to detect possible obstacles and  communicate them through a voice synthesizer.

Diana Palacios

[Diagram made at the first group meeting]

After having chosen several ideas that seemed viable to us, we began to build prototypes,  this allowed us to redesign and retake ideas that we had previously discarded and begin to  converge on a solution that covered the needs that were within our reach and that also  added more value to our project, because by having physical prototypes we were able to  observe the difficulties that we could have when adding certain devices that we had chosen,  and the new solutions contemplated new ways of being a product that was comfortable and  provided more security to the user. We were able to show the prototypes to some users and  listen to their opinions about them.

Insight and approach

Having used the visualization tool in our development led us to come up with a very different  solution to the one we had mainly planned. Initially we thought that due to the limitations of  the project, the scope could not be very wide. Being able to tune our ideas and thoughts by  capturing them in a visual way, helped us to reach a consensus more fluidly and with a  greater speed. The time this saved us allowed us to have more time to develop and  prototype to cover areas that we had not previously thought about.

Initially, the project would only indicate the proximity of an object in the user's path. The final  prototype was a system with a network of sensors that work in conjunction with a camera  and a voice synthesis system. The system detects obstacles near the user, takes a photo  and through artificial vision techniques, it indicates the user what direction to take (one step  to the left or right, if possible) to avoid the obstacle through a voice command. The sensors  are connected to the development board through Bluetooth to avoid having problems in the  movement of the users. The solution presented was very compelling for all the stakeholders  and we will definitely continue to use it for future works due to the very valuable aspects it  brought to this project.

Diana Palacios

[Final prototype]

