Well let’s have a big round of applause for my team, Mothers Do Matter! Last week we pulled through and completed our memorandum. It was a lot of work, a lot of research and a lot of editing but we did it. So you may be thinking, what’s next for this amazing group? And I’m here to tell you we will be working on our Design Proposal. YAY! SO MUCH FUN!
But…. you’re probably thinking… wait that’s no fun. OH but it is! This will be the last step before we’re able to actually start designing our new breast pumps which will surely be #1 on the market. My group is excited to throw all our ideas out there and to make the best breast pump possible.
What is a Design Proposal? I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a way of presenting our idea to a group of people that will support and fund our project. Now the next question you may have is why don’t they just read our memorandum? The answer to that question is that these people are busy people and they don’t have the time to read it so they just want a brief summary that entails everything we have in store for them.
So let me catch you up on what we’ve been doing to prepare for our Design Proposal. We’ve been researching specifications that we must meet when constructing and designing our breast pump. We read documents such as Engineering Design Projects where we learned about things we should be considering when it comes to our breast pumps. Here we learned that we must consider material properties, cost/availability, processing and the environment. We must consider how long we’re expecting our breast pump to last the mothers to make sure we choose the right materials. Another thing we must think about is making our materials don’t interfere with the nutrients the baby will be receiving from their mother. For example we have to make sure our breast pump won’t contain any BBP.
Another website we visited to help us with our research is the United States Department of Labor. Here we did not find what we hoped to. We did find out about that breast milk does not transfer HIV and HBV however we are still looking into how that could help us in our design. We’re still researching biomedical regulations when it comes to our breast pumps but aren’t having any luck. So if you see anything be sure to let us know. We did realize that if we did want to make our breast pumps customizable we were going to have to gather data on what sizes our breast pumps will need to be.
Well that’s it for now! Stay tuned for our next blog post! Thanks for reading!
-Amanda Campos
*All pictures were taken by Amanda Campos
StarPathDesign 
Leave a Reply