Problems:
- Bowl tipping over from the weight of your spoon: While eating any food out of a bowl, you may run into the problem of your spoon outweighing your bowl causing the bowl to tip over. Obviously this is easily fixable by using a glass bowl, but with plastic, you still run into this problem. Creating some sort of clip on stand could help contain your inner rage and spilled milk.
- Wine glasses smudge and attract finger prints easily: Working efficiently while maintaining speed behind the bar can be difficult. When serving drinks, especially in high class restaurants, you want your glasses to be as clean as possible. Microfiber towels are a good source to clean finger prints off the glass, but take precious time when in a busy situation. While talking to my manager at work, he concluded that this is in fact a problem for not only the bar tenders, but also the servers. Imagine yourself at that bar or table. Would you want your glass to show dirty hand prints while your trying to enjoy an expensive glass of wine?
- Cutting fruit quickly and in specific sections while keeping your hands safe: There are many fruit cutters on the market already that are made for specific fruits or veggies, but you still have to either deal with the use of a knife or blades facing your direction. Cheap slicers may also break easily from the torque and pressure of each fruit. If created, our goal would be to create a slicer that is much safer, durable, and can cut a multitude of foods.
- There are four different pens and color options for the smart board, why not create one pen with a button in order to change the color option: Although there are four pen options to chose from, only one student can write on the smart board at once. Why have four separate markers when you could create one pen with a button in order to change the color. You could also incorporate more than four colors into the pen's system.
- Silencer for dentistry tools: No one enjoys loud dentist tools that give you the goose bumps. Technology will eventually make these tools more user friendly and patient friendly, but a silencer tool to place on the end of electronic tools could help you keep calm while getting those pearly whites cleaned.
Problem Statement
Based on a United Kingdom survey posed by Miele Professional in 2014, 52% of customers out of 2,000 stated that dirty glassware was their top "restaurant turnoff."
Survey
We designed our survey to do some market research and see buyers opinions. We noticed that most people polish wine glasses by hand which takes a lot of time and is inconvenient. Also most people have never looked into buying an automated wine glass polisher or have been discouraged due to the price. Our goal is to make an affordable manual wine glass polisher.
https://goo.gl/forms/KqA20NVqOfb7Xpwq2
https://goo.gl/forms/KqA20NVqOfb7Xpwq2
Justification of The Problem
Summary
These first couple weeks of our capstone project were crucial to the rest of the semester. It was very difficult thinking of problems that have not been solved and we could solve ourselves. Our first couple ideas consisted of bowls tipping over from the weight of your spoon, wine glasses smudge and get fingerprints on them very easily, cutting fruit is difficult and dangerous, one pen that changes color on the smart board, and a silencer for dentistry tools. Our decision matrix led us to the fruit problem, but under further research we found that there are currently hundreds of methods for cutting fruit already and getting around already invented products would be difficult. We did some more research on the wine glass problem and it seemed to be legitimate because quality wine glass polishers cost between $1,000 and $1,500. We thought we could make a wine glass polisher that spins like the expensive ones, but is completely manual. After further research into the problem we noticed that bar tenders do not have enough time to polish wine glasses and most do not even polish them at all after going through the dishwasher. We decided this was the perfect place to start our survey. our first survey question is- Do/Have you worked in he restaurant industry? This question provides us for an idea of the credibility of those taking our survey. Our second question is- Have you ever had to clean wine glasses? again, this question provides us with and idea about the credibility of those taking our survey. Our third question is-After going through the dishwasher we... then the survey takers are left with options 1) We polish them by hand 2) we polish them with an automated wine glass polisher 3) we do not polish them, this question gives us insight on the amount of people either not polishing them or wasting time polishing them by hand. Our fourth question is- If polishing is executed how long does it take per glass? this question allows us to have some sort of insight to the existing products we are competing with. our fifth question is-If polishing by hand, have you ever looked into switching to an automated wine glass polisher? This will allow us to have some insight on the markets opinion of hand polishing. Our sixth question is-Have you ever been discouraged about buying a wine glass polisher due to the price, considering they sell for up to $1,500? This question will show us how many people would be discouraged due the price of an automated wine glass polisher. Our final question is- How much would you be willing to pay for a wine glass polisher? This question allows us to know what price range we have to work with for our product. I hope that our survey will support our suggested problem.