Last day of the workshop, we did our last practice of the presentation and everything seemed to go well and on time. Nevertheless, there was a detail that my group still didn’t know how to solve, the YUTPA analysis. We asked the energy group for help, since they had a similar problem and they managed to make the analysis, they helped us and we added it to the presentation.
After the presentation we received a feedback from the judges, and then our problem was so obvious, we couldn’t make the YUTPA analysis because we didn’t add a social component to our design, we decided from the very beginning the functions we were going to work on, and all of them were technical. We thought as engineers, because all of us are engineers and our central topic (water) is a typical engineer problem.
I was glad to finish our presentation, and happy with the result, because all of us work really hard and we came out with good solutions, but at the same time I was disappointed because none of us made the connection with the social component of our topic, we just focused on solving everything from a technical perspective.
In any case, it was an amazing experience, I’m really thankful I had it, and this mistake leave me a big lesson, I’m sure the next time I face a similar challenge I will try to abstract myself and think a little bit out of the box, before I focus on solving everything the way I’m used to.
Day 5
An important lesson: when you have certain schemes in your mind about how to solve a problem, is when it is more important to stop for a while and try to think out of the box.
