Live Well Collaborative

My Sticky Innovation class recently visited the Live Well Collaborative. Knowing nothing about who they were or what they did, I immediately wondered how this relates to bees and our course. As we walked in, we saw several displays up of projects they’ve completed to solve problems. The displays were creative and drew my attention. For example, they created their own version of the game Clue as a part of their display of home designs that will meet the needs of the elderly. Once everyone settled in, we began to learn about Live Well Collaborative, and it became immediately apparent how it connected to our course. Their goal is to solve problems by using a multidisciplinary approach, which is one of the main goals of our course. Live Well is hired to find solutions through design and creative thinking. They have people with all different types of skills working on their projects, so they are able to come up with a solution that solves multiple aspects of a problem. One thing that surprised me was that they seemed to do everything from the design to a product being built on their own. Even the displays in the office were created by them. I found it fascinating to see real examples of how multidisciplinary design is utilized since we have been discussing it so much.

We then went downstairs to the Maker Space on the ground floor. I had no idea that it was even there, so I was amazed when we walked down to see it. The Maker Space is opening soon and will be able to be used by all UC students. It seemed to have any machine you could possibly think of to bring a design to life. We learned about the 3D printers, laser cutters, and more. It made me extremely eager to utilize the technology available there, but I had no idea what I would use it for. It was suggested that we could use the tools for our final projects, but I still couldn’t think of how I would use anything there. Then, it was suggested that we could determine which machine we wanted to learn how to use, and the idea for how to incorporate it into our project would come later. This seemed like thinking backwards to me, but it introduced me to another way of brainstorming ideas to solve a problem.
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