PEER COMMENTS

Li, XiaoLing Susanna

Daugherty, Ryan

Widjaja, Jennifer

Shao, LuFei Vivian

Chan, Wawen

DESIGNING FOR DISASTER

SELF-INFLATED LIFE BUOY 

Background

We are designing for floods in China. Flood happens frequently in China and  China is a country with large population, so when flood comes , a lot of people lose their homes, get injured or even die.  According to this background, I choose to focus on the speed to rescue people through my product design which means how to improve the time efficiency to reduce the injuries and deaths.

Life buoy can be considered as one of the most important tools during rescue. I did researches on the current life buoy situation at the very beginning and found that the normally used life buoy nowadays is not convenient for people to carry. During rescue, rescuer can only carry 2 once and the other way is to put some life buoys in a boat. These 2 ways can really delay the precious rescue time.

My concept

My target market is people who live in flood- prone areas and my concept is a self-inflated life buoy which can catch a lot of air to provide people buoyancy with the help of a spring. The original shape of this product is a round container with 3 main components on it: the air duct, the button to release the container and the spring inside it.

How does my product work?

1.      Open the cap of the air duct

2.      Press the two buttons around the edge of the container to release the cap (the whole product will pop out immediately to catch air)

3.      Close the cap of the air duct(the product is now like a tube)

4.      Connect the two ends around your waist with buckle

5.      Finished

The whole process spends you less than 15 seconds.

How it answers the brief, benefits?

It is portable due to the size is not too big and it is much smaller comparing with current life buoy and most parts of this product are made from plastic, it is not heavy. So people who live in flood-prone areas can always take this product with them.  No matter when flood comes, they are already prepared.

On the other hand, rescuers can carry more once, they can put many of this products in a bag and give them to people who need it. This can help to save the rescue time

In conclusion, this product can cover both preparedness and response areas in the disasters. People can get prepared before flood comes or rescuers can save more lives during the disaster.

REFLECTION

In the past two years I learned many skills to improve the communication: CAD, sketching, rhino and workshop operation. Now my presentation is more like a real presentation. But I do need to apologize of my poor oral presentation, that is why I put so many effort to do the model, try my best to make the appearance more like a real product and even make it not only a appearance model but also can show how does it work. And also I spent a quite a long time to do the CAD and rendering. Hope all these efforts can show you a good communication. English is not my first language; I really need to improve my English and I hope I can do better for the next project, I will spend more time to prepare my oral presentation for the next project.

And I think the past studios are more focus on products’ aesthetics, practicability. This project is more focus on to solve a problem. There are many solutions to solve a problem, but our task is to find the best solution which requires time efficiency, practicability and we also need to consider the materials used and product cost of the product. That is not easy for us to do this whole project, which is why I feel so relaxed after the presentation.

As an industrial designer, we are designing products not only can be used, but also help to improve people’s quality of life. We should always keep an eye on what is happening now; we need to think is there anyone waiting for us to help him or her. There are quite a lot requirements in our daily life, some may happen frequently but we do not discover it.

For this project, it is so lucky that I decided to design a self-inflated life buoy from the second week and keep developing my concepts in the following weeks. But I spent so much time on researching materials and technologies, some of them are not necessary towards my final design. And I spent a long time to do the model in the last week. Spent 3 days in the workshop to do the outside model and 3 nights to do the sewing of the inside model. If I could have more time or I was to do this project again, I really want to do some floating test. Try to find out how many air the product need and the load weight. These are really important to show evidence of the practicability of my product.