The Knee Team – Cindy M.

During class right now and for the past couple of days, my team and I have been working on our Preliminary Design Proposal.

This is one of my team members, Keira Neal, who is the Shaper in our team, working on the Statement of Problem for our Design Proposal. She is responsible to challenge all of us to move forwards and she has a lot of energy and puts action into the group. She also created our Team Logo. As we all worked on our Design Proposal we did some research of the kinds of injuries there is in roller derby that include the knee and we also researched the statistics about the injuries. Something that I learned by doing this research is that in 2007, Women’s Flat track Derby Association did a survey on roller derby injuries and found that 574 people announced having a joint injury that kept them from not being able to play roller derby and that out of those 574 people, 262(46%) people reported having a knee injury, and 36 of those people mentioned having a PCL (Posterior Cruciate Ligament) injury. For our Design Development Status, we came up with some good “Customer Interview Questions”and created our “Customer Need Table”.

 

 

For our “Proposed Design Sketch”, we decided to all do the three sketch design activity. We drew three drawings of an idea we had for the creation of our product in a piece of paper and then rotated to leave any notes, comments, or concerns on our drawings. I think that this was something helpful for our “Concept Iteration” because I sketched down my ideas and got feedback from my teammates on how I could possibly make it better or make anything clearer and see what others think of my own ideas. Also because I could see others ideas and maybe use them in a way to be more creative with my own.

What I learned was that the knee is the largest joint in the body and is known as a synovial joint which can be also be known as diarthrosis, this is responsible for providing flexibilty and motion to the frame of the body. It is when two or more bones of the body come together. I also learned the articulating bones the knee has which are, the femur and the tibia. Another thing that I learned was the most common injury that could happen to the knee that is called Osteoarthritis. The way that this injury happens is when the cartilage is lost or becomes bumpy and then results in stiffness and pain. This knee injury can be caused by stress on the knee from work or athletic activity.

Throughout this whole process with my group we have learned new things about the knee and how we could make changes to our product that we are thinking of building. I don’t know how it will turn out to be because we always discover that there is some changes to be made and we face some challenges but I’m excited to see how our product will turn out to be.