Day 2: Design and Accessible Documentation

Aug 1, 2019

Attendees
Maria, Mike, Ryan, Alex, Ting, Adam

Summary
Maria shared a lot of expertise about design strategy and how to organize teams around a design project. (details in notes section). We discussed making documentation more accessible for users by considering the range of backgrounds and even creating and categorizing documentation for specific groups. We also discussed the idea of where these projects and documentation are stored. Does it make sense to create a database focused on open science hardware? Should the GOSH community create a set of standards or suggested guidelines for sharing?

Notes
Maria presented a design workshop

• Begin with asking the right questions
What is the problem space?
Does the audience think it is important?
• Design thinking was pioneered by large tech organizations. 5 stages:
Empathize (ask lots of questions to get in the head of the end user)
Define (decide which features are most important)
Ideate
Test
Prototype
• Double Diamond model (Divergent and Convergent thinking)
Discover (presented an empathy map canvas)
Define – How might we…?
• Need to focus on where user needs, business needs, and technological feasibility converge
• Suggested article: “Why software fails”

Accessible Documentation
• Documentation is a huge issue to connect designers with those who want to build other’s designs.
• Documentation should target the appropriate users (scientists, technicians, hackers, makers, hobbyist, etc)
• Documentation here is defined as the information the target user would need to assemble and operate the hardware.

Resources
Where do we host designs and documentation? Current offerings:

  1. GrabCAD
  2. Instructables
  3. Thingiverse
  4. Github
  5. NIH 3D Print Exchange
  6. Open builds
  7. Welder engineering projects

Action items
Maria to provide useful links for documentation standards and guidelines
Should GOSH create a set of standards or guidelines for sharing open source projects?
Create list of websites that already exist for sharing open source hardware projects