Engineering Design

For my team’s smartphone project, we decided to put together a survey, which gave us feedback on what our users had, liked, and disliked about their smartphone.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dHFYSUF5NTBYUjRiaWRwQUZ1NGhTQ1E6MQ

Upon looking across the data we received I started to notice that the responses we get are only related to the questions we ask. This may sound self explanatory, but it’s really quite surprising. Not only how you word the question, but how you choose the method of response determines the data you finally get. For example, some of our questions could be ambiguous, such as: most of our question were tailored to smartphone users, even though we asked at the beginning of the survey, “Do you own a smartphone?”

Gary Barber had an interesting blog post on this topic: http://manwithnoblog.com/2010/02/17/user-surveys-do-it-right-or-not-at-all/

Although our survey wasn’t long or multiple pages, I can easily see a few ways that we could have made our survey more effective.

A friend of mine shared this on Facebook, and I thought it was quite interesting: http://hzo.me/about/

This company’s goal is to develop a waterproof material that would become mainstream in new electronics. I don’t think anyone would say that something like this would be a bad thing to have in electronics, but I found the inspiration for the company remarkable.

A maritime student fell in the Mississippi River, and found a rope to hang off of. He tried calling for help with his cell phone, but the fall in the water rendered it useless. He then tried a maritime-issue radio, but it had suffered the same fate. The student was eventually crushed between the barge and a door to a lock on the river. He left behind a wife and two children.

I guess necessity is the mother of all invention. Who knows if this new technology will save someone in a similar case. However, this inspiration is still technology making our lives better, whether or not it saves your life, or saves your phone an accidental drop in the toilet.

As opposed to what Malcom Gladwell said in his article Small Change, I do not think that social media and technology impedes social revolution. In fact, I feel that it is a catalyst to speed such demonstrations up as never before. Although the Woolworth’s sit-ins did not require the use of Twitter or Facebook, there is no reason to say that they could not have helped facilitate the demonstration. Rather than the sit-ins spreading fifty miles away within one week, and across state borders in approximately two weeks, Facebook would have given it the opportunity to spread across the entire country within mere hours. For instance, take a look at the Occupy Wall Street movement, a modern-day protest. With the new help of Facebook and Twitter, in about the same time that the sit-ins just crossed state lines, the Occupy movement reached over 95 cities across 82 countries, and over 600 communities in the United States. The important thing is that ideas travel faster than ever in today’s day and age with the use of the internet.

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