This week due to the weather, we had a virtual class. I was very excited to use Zoom and I believe the session was still productive despite the weather setback.
I really enjoyed the presentation and feedback from milestone labs. They showed us how to examine opportunities we found in our daily lives and to determine the design need. A great example was one girl shared how she kept losing her keys. Therefore, she decided to put her keys on a hair tie and keep it around her wrist. I too did the same thing last year when I kept losing my keys. I had never even realized this was a design opportunity and how I had come up with an innovative solution to the problem.
I also really liked learning about assistive devices. I had never before considered how glasses were an assistive device. Other great examples mentioned by my classmates were hearing aids and walkers. It was interesting to see how sometimes a design hack can easily become to universally accepted design. The example given to us by milestone labs was the hack of putting tennis balls on the bottom of walkers. This soon became the accepted design and products entered the market for walkers that were modeled after tennis balls.
I think the presentation by milestone labs gave us a lot of great ideas to consider when moving forward with our project. One of my big takeaways was a design can almost always be improved. Milestone did a great job of pointing out how people come up with design hacks daily and just because these hacks work, it doesn’t mean they are necessarily the best version. We shared our preliminary ideas with milestone labs and one of our ideas was creating a wheelchair cup holder or phone holder. We had initially had this idea however, we conducted some research and realized there were already a lot of products on the market. However, milestone encourage us to ask our mentors how helpful these products were because there is always room for improvement.
Moving forward, our team will be focusing on an idea that Arielle (our preferred mentor) brought to our attention. We will be trying to improve an athlete’s grip on the hand ring of the racing wheelchairs under difficult weather conditions. Specifically, the example we were given was if an athlete is racing in the rain the grip can become slippery and this provides unfavorable conditions. We will be looking to work with multiple textures and we will have to find a way to put a cover on both the top of the hand ring and the sides.
Gies College of Business || May 2019
Supply Chain Management & Information Systems/Information Technology
I think that your team’s idea to make a product that can help increase grip is really interesting, and as a former athlete myself, it really pricked my interest! One direction your team could use for research is to take inspiration from other sports and non-wheelchair sports which have already done a lot of research into grip issues. For example, in track, we use spikes to maintain a better grip on the track material, so if you were to play around with maybe encasing the part of the wheelchair that is gripped with track material and modifying to glove to be more spike-like, that could be an option. Another option is to study the design of the other sports’ solutions (in badminton, the shoes have a certain shape and certain design elements on the sole of the shoe to get better friction and decrease slippage on gym floors). I can’t wait to see what direction your team takes your project in!