Introductions:

Team Members: Natalie, Brandt, and Peyton

Client: Donnie

Meeting Date: March 13th, 2024

Meeting Location: Community Living And Support Services (CLASS) Pittsburgh

Natalie, Brandt, and Peyton make up Team Buttercups for the Spring 2024 iteration of IDeATe: Introduction to Physical Computing. In this class, students learn Arduino programming, electronics, physical fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing), prototyping, and human-centric design. Our final project is to make an assistive device for a client with a disability who has experienced a traumatic brain injury. To kick off our project, our class took a field trip to CLASS, where we got to tour the facilities and sit down to meet and interview our client, Donnie. Our goal for the meeting was to learn a bit about Donnie and try to glean what kind of assistive device we could create to make something in his life a little more convenient. 

Meeting Agenda:

We decided to start our conversation with a quick icebreaker of personal introductions, consisting of our name, age, and where we’re from, before explaining our project and why we’re here.

These are the questions that we intended to go through in the meeting. We didn’t cover all of these questions or go exactly in this order. Also, to prepare for this meeting, we brought white construction paper and coloured markers to take notes and potentially illustrate concepts. 

1. What’s your day-to-day routine?

2. What are your hobbies?

3. Are there any daily tasks that you have difficulty with?

4. Are there any daily/weekly tasks that you find annoying?

5. Is there anything about your day-to-day routine that a small gadget could help with?

6. Is there anything that you find inconvenient that a small gadget could help with?

7. Would you like this gadget to be a certain color, something you can hold in your hand, smooth, or have sound, etc.?

8. Do you enjoy fidgeting with things?

9. Is there anyone in CLASS or your life that you communicate with regularly?

10. What activities bring you joy?

11. What activities do you like doing with other people?

12. What activities do you find unpleasant?

13. Would you like this gadget to be portable?

14. Are you interested in having a gadget that can sit in your room or have a dual function as decor?

15. What’s your favourite part of your day?

16. What’s your least favorite part of your day?

Meeting Summary:

Through the course of the meeting, we learned a lot about Donnie as an individual and his background as a restaurant worker in the 90’s. Donnie seemed to always have a systematic routine in place for himself, especially when working and taking notes as a waiter on a notebook. His routine seemed very important and, most importantly, worked for him. Donnie explained an instance where he had to quit his job at a specific restaurant when an employer prevented him from using his notebook system, further demonstrating the importance of this specific routine. He seemed to have carried the notebook system into his daily life, where he would take notes about it. Unfortunately, there were instances where he would forget to bring the notebook around, like the initial date when we met with Donnie. Donnie explained that he had around a two-minute short-term memory span. Therefore, this system of taking notes for memory is a key factor in his life as a precise individual who, in his own words, wanted to be more productive. Through our meeting, we really got to know Donnie as a person and his life story.

Reflection:

Our interview with Donnie started well. We were able to get some questions answered. But Donnie did talk a lot, so sometimes he kept talking, and we didn’t necessarily stop him; we just listened to him. There were times, though, when we interjected to ask something different. With his short-term memory loss, he would keep repeating the same stories and the same answers to us without at all realizing that he was doing so. We didn’t mind this, though, given his disability; we would try to work around it by asking different questions to try to get to a different topic. If we were to do this again, we would probably ask more direct questions about what he would want from us and what we could build for him. He thought we were at a higher level than we actually were, so it would've been helpful if we could’ve done a better job showing that we were pretty low-tech as students. I’d say that, overall, it was a good interview that was pretty productive. We all enjoyed talking to Donnie; he was very interesting, especially through his personal story. We are super grateful to Donnie for his time and CLASS for hosting us.

Below are our notes from our meeting with Donnie: We learned about Donnie overall.