Tuesday 19 May 2015

Ready, GET SET, Go!

Last Friday I got to meet 60 girls in College thinking about studying engineering. I was on my best Glambassador behaviour as the ANU hosted these girls for the day. (I prefer the term Glambassador to Ambassador because I feel it better represents me).


We took them around to 4 different workshops relating to renewable energy, systems engineering, humanitarian engineering and biomedical engineering. I spent the day at the renewable energy workshop where we proved that red wind turbines actually do go faster.

Here's a photo of a (pretty cardboard) turbine that a student made. It had an efficiency of two percent! I had to take a photo of the yellow one because the red was just too fast to capture. (For any non-science people, this is a joke and red does not make things go faster).


I never had an opportunity like this. I was asked to speak to the girls at the beginning about why I chose engineering and I realised that it was a reeeeally last minute decision (the day before applications closed) sparked by my encounter with some Canadian engineering students that I met overseas. I had never even realised that engineering was a degree you could study and something you could be a professional in. It sounds stupid now, but the idea was just never presented to me. I was really jealous of these girls last week who were able to see all of these things and also learn about systems engineering too.

I'm definitely going to write an email to my old school telling them to get on board with ANU's Get Set program. It could have saved me a lot of time wondering what I wanted to do! (Not that I regret spending 7 months overseas on my gap year “finding myself”).

I think the ways of getting girls involved in degrees like engineering are a lot simpler than people think. Planting the seed in the girls' mind is all we need to do! They already know they like maths or science or teamwork or whatever it is, but they just need to be shown that these are all things we get to do in engineering!

Love,
Em.

Wednesday 13 May 2015

Project Presentation

Today we tried to put 20 students into our client's shoes for our group project. We began by simulating an office meeting where the "speaker" (me, miming to simulate our hearing-impaired client’s experience of work meetings) was presenting a pie chart on one side of the room while what was being said was being displayed on a projector across the room. The students were trying to watch what I was pointing to on the chart, read the text being displayed across the room, process the information and have an opinion on it simultaneously.

Here's the text and my special pie chart! (I called my character Jemima because she was miming…no one noticed this joke).

In the short presentation, the students couldn't see where/what I was pointing to and read the text at the same time. So, of course, there were no objections after I said a particular table of people were going to fail and I was going to reduce everyone's grades by 30%. Also, no one noticed that the pie chart didn't even add up to 100%...

 Luckily, I'm not in control of their grades or any of the technical drawings for our assignment!

 Lots of them laughed when I told them what we had done, but it seemed like a really effective way of making them see how serious the problem was.

 Below is an "artists impression" of the app we designed. The client can see the transcription of the meeting while watching a video of what's going on around her. Heaps of ideas were tossed around from projector displays to google glass, but this best realised the client's requirements.


 I even stole a line from my previous blog ("Social Engineering") for the end of the presentation where we had decided we wanted to "say something profound".  Here it is:

 "This simple system is important because we're levelling the playing field by allowing someone to demonstrate their ability and not their disability to their co-workers."

 And that's how little projects like these are really part of something much, much bigger than they seem.

 Love,
Emily
AKA Jemima

Saturday 2 May 2015

Social Engineering

I had two assignments due this week. While the tasks couldn't have been more different, they were both tackling the same issue - deafness. The first was a structured report containing the functional analysis for my group project (basically what the steps are that a system has to complete to do its job). We're designing a new display system for a transcription process that will allow a deaf employee to participate more effectively in workplace meetings (pretty cool stuff as this is all for a real client). The second was a philosophy paper discussing different definitions of "disability", deafness as a disability and when governments should interfere in disabled persons lives. 

 Here's my group working really hard!


It was a really weird week for me. For the engineering assignment, I had to look at the situation objectively, carry out technical analysis and take a practical approach to the client's issue. However my mind was constantly interrupting me with deep, abstract questions about the state of disability. Is their "disability" just a social problem that's been created by our own failure to adapt the world around them?  Is deafness even a disability? What does society owe them? I also wondered whether they identified as deaf or Deaf (yep, deaf with a capital d is a thing - and by thing, I mean a really well developed culture, look it up: http://www.deafculture.com). 

At first these questions frustrated me, but as I worked on my philosophy paper, I began to answer these questions and then my answers began to provide context for the engineering project. I don't believe disability is purely a social problem (i.e. something caused by unjustified social attitudes and a world full of design flaws), but I think that governments, of course, have responsibilities to technically-disabled persons to raise awareness about their condition, promote their participation in the work force and invest in adapting the way things function so that normal tasks become easier for them. I realised that these things are exactly what the group project is doing. We're levelling the playing field by allowing someone to more efficiently participate in their workplace. This allows them to demonstrate their ability and not their disability to their co-workers. 

Design requirements and optimisation aside, it became clear that the project's goals tap in to a large social movement beyond this one client. The overall motivation for projects like this is to create something that enhances someone's ability to do a desired activity in a way that has the power, however small, to address the unjustified social attitudes surrounding disability and make the world more usable for everybody.

Here's me looking pensive. Please don't take me too seriously.

While it's hard to say whether thinking about these things had a measured impact on the project, I think it was really important to remember why we were doing it (beyond "because our lecturer/boss told us to"). I think it's so easy to forget about what motivates a project. Projects revolve around people, and so often there's a bigger picture to look at.

Every time I start a project, I'm going to ask myself why I'm doing it. I'll look at not only why the client wants me to do it or why it benefits us directly, but why the project is valuable to some bigger idea.

Love from, 
Philosophical Emily

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