Today I had a rough start to the morning; my alarm didn’t go off. So what was supposed to be a 7:40 wake-up for an 8:30 meet-up turned into an 8:30 wake-up for an 8:30 meet-up. Luckily, Sascha and I got ready fast and got down to the lobby by 8:35, where Dr. Professor was waiting for us. It could have gone a lot worse than it did. We caught up to the group by the time we got to the University and even ended up getting there a few minutes early, so no harm, no foul.

I didn’t quite know what to expect when coming into the workshop, but I loved every second of it. We started off with creative exercises to warm up the brain. Saioa gave each of us a piece of paper with different images on it, and we had to use the random image to mold it into a picture. I found it so fun. We also did a second brief warm-up drawing how we see ourselves now v.s. in 10 years. Both activities were great and really fun.

After, we started working on the problems that we identified last Friday. Our problem was safe and efficient patient transfer. The first step was to put ourselves in the shoes of the hospital workers and patients to fully identify the specific pain points we could address. We completed the skits and found that we wanted to give the patient more head and neck stability, as well as give the hospital workers a mechanical advantage to reduce strain.

We spent a few minutes brainstorming until we came up with an idea. We learned about a board currently used in hospitals, so we decided to design one on a track with a headgear to address our previously outlined challenges. The next step was to model our prototype. We took clay and molded it to showcase our idea on top of a plastic mini hospital bed with a disproportionately big patient on top.

After all the groups finished, we started presenting and then had lunch. Lunch was delicious; they did a fantastic job on my pork today. After lunch, it was my group’s turn to present. All went well.

Then, we cleaned up and headed out to walk towards the fine arts museum. It started pouring on our walk over, and this was the one day I didn’t bring an umbrella because I rushed out of the room so fast. I got soaked.

The fine arts museum was interesting, but I feel like I would have liked it more if I weren’t cold, wet, and hungry. It was super cool that they had an Andy Warhol painting as well, just like the Guggenheim.

I’m excited for tomorrow and will make sure I have 10 alarms set so that what happened today won’t happen again.