Embedded Files
Brief Introduction
This is documentation for the final project of Physical Computing at Carnegie Mellon University during the Spring 2026 semester. In this project, we met with Mike the Mason, who works at CMU’s Facilities Management Services (FMS) on Monday, March 30th at the FMS building on campus. The people in attendance for our group were Andy Mann, Sophie Heap, Jack Estabrook, and Rion Kurihara. Our Team name for this project is Bobwhites.
Your meeting agenda: Team: Bobwhites, Client: Mason
Goal: gather sufficient information about the client’s work environment and habits to be able to identify a need they have that can be fulfilled with a technological solution.
Agenda
Questions to understand the need
Basic info
Work hours + days
What are the areas or buildings your team is responsible for?
Walk us through a typical day at work in as much detail as possible, from the time you arrive on campus
What is the typical route you physically take throughout the day? What locations do you visit, and in what order?
What tasks do you do in the shop, and what do you do on-site
Ask for them to demonstrate / pantomime the different tasks
How do work orders currently come to you and when?
How do you mark it as read / checked?
Have you ever missed a work request? How do you prevent missed notifications?
Are there ever any emergencies you have to deal with? What kind of emergencies? If so, do you receive such notifications differently?
What is the metric of success for your team?
Has a task ever taken longer than expected / promised? What happens?
What tools do you use on a day-to-day basis?
How do you keep them organized?
How do you maintain them?
Are there things you often forget and have trouble with when it comes to your tools
How often do you have to onboard and train new team members?
When you are showing a new hire the ropes, what is the hardest task to teach them?
Are there parts of the job that require a 'sixth sense'—like knowing a machine is acting up just by how it sounds or feels?
What in your day-to-day life is the most inconvenient to you? What would make your job easier? Is there any task you don’t like doing in particular? Why?
Are there any repetitive tasks?
What do you think could be done to try to alleviate the inconvenience?
Have you or your colleagues built any DIY solutions already?
*When talking about specific potential solutions
If we were to build a physical device for problem XYZ, where could the device sit?
Does that area have access to a standard wall plug or wifi?
Does the area get particularly wet or hot?
To close
Share contact information
Discuss next steps
Meeting summary and major takeaways:
In our meeting, the main thing we were doing was being walked through what Mike does daily. Coming into the meeting, Mike already had a strong idea of the problem he wanted solved. In his work, he has to clean paddles that are used to mix plaster and/or cement. However, due to physical limitations, he needs to have another set of hands on standby to clean the paddle. Thus, his intention was wanting a way for us to clean the paddle so he did not need to have a set of second hands. Whether the idea was coming at it from finding a way to scrape off the material before it set or finding some chemical solution, which would be out of the scope of this project, this was the main thing he wanted to talk about, and primarily only did.
He demonstrated mixing a small batch of Set 20 material, showing how he estimates the amounts of plaster powder and water by eye, adjusts as needed, and mixes it using a drill and paddle. We also watched him mimic his assistant’s routine for rinsing the paddle, and how drastically different the process is depending on whether it’s done before or after the material sets. Our impression was that cleaning before it sets is relatively easy and similar to removing clay; the real challenge is not technique or force, but acting quickly enough before the material hardens.
Here is a paddle which has hardened and solidified with the plaster
Here is another angle of a dried plaster paddle, albeit this one is far less destroyed
Bucket of dried plaster
IMG_6797.MOVVideo of Mike adjusting plaster powder and water amount to achieve a satisfactory paste of plaster (set20). He mixes with a paddle and a drill
Your thoughts after holding the meeting and discussing as a team:
Overall, this went well considering its short nature. We walked away with very in-depth information and a clearly defined problem. However, the one major issue with our interview was that Mike’s experience and knowledge he only focused on this one paddle issue, and despite our attempts to steer the conversation away from just the paddle, that did not happen. As the interview was conducted in Mike's workplace while standing, we failed to reference our meeting agenda questions, causing the conversation to stray from the planned script. This environment also hindered our ability to take notes in real-time, and resulted in us documenting our observations afterward. The conversation flowed pretty well, but that was because Mike was super invested and was telling us a ton of information on his paddle problem.
After the interview, the one question that I think we could have asked earlier is just asking directly “If we cannot solve this problem, what other problems do you encounter in your work?” We tried to indirectly steer the conversation a bit, but I think asking directly could have helped us generate a second idea.
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