I am an initiative-taker
From my time at Keurig Dr Pepper to my design classes at Northwestern, I relish the opportunity to take initiative and push the boundaries of what’s expected from me and my team. The following stories show what came of those opportunities…
Nearing the end of the fall quarter in our service design class at Northwestern, our studio shared out what we had been working on with our project partners at the Art Institute of Chicago. Afterward, we were talking informally with one of our project partners and she ran by us a design problem she was discussing with her team. As she explained the situation, we started to brainstorm out loud as a group, throwing out ideas and sketching them on the board, grouping them. She really liked an idea I proposed, and she and my professor briefly discussed whether it would be possible to pull some mockups together to show the idea to her team—but it was a quick turnaround—this was a decision they had to make quickly.
I jumped at the opportunity to take it on. Building physical mockups is something I enjoy immensely and hadn’t had a ton of practice doing, so I told them I could do it and went along with my day, full of excitement to have this opportunity—however small—to contribute to the visitor experience at this museum. By next morning I’d sent off photos of the mockup to our project partner on behalf of the studio—here’s one of them!
During my co-op at Keurig Dr Pepper, as I was designing a test fixture for a specific component of their brewers, I realized that I needed to 3D print a key component of the fixture. Although I was comfortable with SolidWorks and NX modeling at that point, I’d never 3D printed anything before, but I was convinced that this would be not only the best option for the design, but also our most economically viable option, so I immediately reached out to one of my coworkers—the office’s resident 3D printing expert.
He was heading out of town for the week but was happy to give me some pointers on the process and show me how to get started. After I’d gotten those first pointers, I immediately got to work on printing out my component, and after considerable trial and error realized that one of the filament materials my coworker had ordered to use as a standard support material was very easy to separate from PLA but relatively weak. It could be put to better use when printed in a single layer between the part and the support material—conserving the strength needed to support large parts but ensuring the surface finish and detailing were conserved perfectly.
After a few rounds of trial and error, I’d determined that this worked excellently—removing the need for delicate and time consuming post-processing and leading to a significant improvement in the quality of the final part. When my coworker came back to the office a week later and made some adjustments to the settings I was using, he agreed with my conclusions and started using that technique regularly in his own 3D printing process.
During my internship last summer at Northwestern’s Segal Design Institute, I had the opportunity to work with a research team that had been partnering with Segal for a few years at that point. My fellow teammates and I got to sit in on several cross-functional team meetings as we moved through this project.
As I familiarized myself with the issues the team was facing throughout the summer, listening to the different stakeholders’ concerns and roadblocks, I had the feeling that it would save us a lot of time to simply come to the table with a few different mockups and ideas for folks to play around with—even if they were very preliminary and low-fidelity.
I proposed this to my team lead, who expressed a bit of hesitation at me mocking something up as it wasn’t something the head researcher had explicitly asked for, so for a while I decided to continue working as usual.
However, for our team’s share out near the end of the summer, I decided to take a risk and mock up an idea that my smaller student team had floated for a while after we did user testing. We thought it would start to address several different usability issues we were running up against, but nobody had taken the step to physically mock it up until I decided to take it on for our last major share out.
I did, however, get permission from my student team lead before our presentation, as I knew I’d be representing them too—and we got overwhelmingly positive feedback in that meeting as a result. The head researcher and other members of the team appreciated having a physical mockup to use as a launching pad, and though there were certainly issues with it (I’ve attached the photo above if you want to take a look—it is definitely a first draft!), it communicated our idea clearly, allowed us to move forward in this area in a way we were struggling to before, and opened up several opportunities to iterate on the content and form with the fantastic feedback we got from different folks in the wider cohort.
One lesson I took to heart and implemented many times in the next school year (including in my senior design capstone) is to take that jump earlier—it’s always better to have something tangible for everyone to take in their hands, inspect and “poke holes” in, because having something to start from even if it is nowhere near the finished product is a step toward solving the problem. It gets everyone on the same page, brings the knowledge gaps to the surface, and gives actionable next steps to iterate on.