November 2008 Archives

Didn't really have time to post anything this past weekend, and don't really have time right now, but this'll be a short one.

Now that the quarter's almost over, things are beginning to pile up and there's a lot to do in pretty much all my classes. I'm mildly concerned that I might not actually finish them all -- which is not really a good thing. Personally, I don't think the primary cause of this is procrastination (I don't know if those around me might say otherwise), but rather, not doing a very good job of estimating scope. As in, "how much can I realistically accomplish within the given time period?" -- whether it's just a 3-day project or one that spans the entire quarter.

With at least one of my classes, I probably picked a project that was a little more involved than what the quarter allowed for. I've already scaled it back from my original idea, but I'm still struggling to finish.

How do you find that balance between pursuing something especially significant and involved, and pursuing something that can assuredly be finished in a short timeframe?

I don't want to simply go through the motions in my projects, because I won't learn as much doing that. But I would like to actually finish them...

I attended a panel on Sustainable Consumer Products tonight at the GSB. There were a couple brand managers from Method, one from Clorox GreenWorks, and the Global Sustainability Lead from IDEO. Interesting discussion, with some surprising overlaps with our recent design projects in ME-313, one having to do with health attitudes and habits, and the other exploring energy efficiency in consumers.

While health, energy efficiency, and environmentally friendly cleaning products have some significant differences, there's an interesting correlation in the attitudes and behaviors of consumers. Much of what the panel discussed were familiar insights observed through our needfinding interviews on both projects.

For example, I was surprised to learn that Method chooses to attract consumers not by touting the environmental friendliness of their products, but rather, with sleek and sexy packaging design that "pops" on the store shelves and just begs a consumer to take a bottle home. Their goal is to design a bottle that looks so good, consumers will feel comfortable leaving it out on the counter all the time. Only over time, as the consumer becomes familiar and comfortable with the product does Method expect them to read the label and learn about how environmentally conscious Method is.

For this design project, we had to create a solution for a cheap, easily distributed, low payload air-droppable disaster shelter that had be easily or automatically deployable. These were to be designed for mass manufacture and to be used primarily in developing nations in massive disaster events. Language differences and potential illiteracy was to be taken into account.

My team began by outlining and prioritizing the problem's design constraints. We felt that the most important criteria were collapsibility/packing efficiency and instant deployment and usability.

We found inspiration in airplane emergency inflatable slides and life jackets, automobile air bags and sun shades, insulating foam, and collapsible laundry hampers. Driven by cost and deployment speed, we decided to build on the laundry hamper and sun shade ideas, and created this concept:

Our concept would be palletized and air-dropped in a disaster zone, where a user would be able to easily transport it to the desired location. Once there, a simple tug on a cord would release folded spring steel hoops that would pop up to form the structure of the shelter. The walls of the structure, a heat-reflective Mylar-like sheet, would unfold with the hoops.

Deployed, this half-domed structure would accommodate a family of 4, although it would also be able to collapse to nearly 5% of its deployed volume for efficient packing and shipping.

Rapid prototyping was the primary focus in this exercise, and as such, we created a wide variety of mock-ups, ranging from small wire and fabric disks illustrating the unfolding process to a full-scale walkthrough model that allowed us to visualize the actual space.

We were pretty pleased with our concept, and felt that it successfully addressed the problem. Aided by our successive iterations of prototypes, we achieved our goals of maximizing the shipping/packing efficiency, minimizing the deployment