This semester I am embarking on an Olin Independent Student (OSS) centered around designing for search and rescue (SAR) volunteers. This is a self designed course where I will be working under the guidance to Scott Harris a long time search and rescue volunteer and head of product definition at Onshape, inc. The goal of the project is to identify key needs of a SAR team and iteratively design a solution to one fill one of those needs.

I will be keeping this blog as an ongoing documentation of my process and work through the semester.

The semester is broken into three phases: research, prototyping and testing, and then final presentation.

The first phase will be focused on researching SAR and meeting with experts to learn as much as possible about their needs. The last two weeks of this phase will be narrowing the focus of the project and clearly defining the problem.The deliverable for the research phase will be a document that thoroughly outline the needs of SAR, identifies areas of potential for future design and clearly a defines a problem.

The second phase with consist of a number of prototyping/testing loops focused on getting the most learning for the littlest amount of time and effort. Refining the design and ideas based off of the feedback from users at each step. This phase will be the bulk of the semester and there will be bi-weekly reports on the progress made and things learned.

The final phase will be solidifying the work of the semester and generating document (poster, paper or website) to present my findings and validated design concepts. This final document will be done such that anyone wishing to continue the project will have enough information about the problem scope, design decisions, rationale and assumptions, technical feasibility and prototype design.

Throughout the project there will be weekly review meetings between Scott and myself to talk about the current state of the project.