2nd Year Final Major Project

Using the same brief as the facebook project; taking an object and adding the internet to make it function better.

i’ve chosen to redesign a prescription pill pot, so that people suffering from arthritis will be able to open it easily without having to force their hands and fingers into positions that they are unable to do any more from the slewing in there joints. Also i will be adding an internet feature, to allow the pill pot to notify the pharmacy of when a prescription will need to be refilled ( based on the weight left in the pill pot), and possible alarm system to allow the pill pot to remind the person to take there medication, either with a vibrating modification or being able to program it to call the house phone as most of the elderly population will not use a mobile phone.

EXISTING PRODUCTS

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RESEARCH ON ARTHRITIS

• Arthiritis
• Rheumatoid arthritis
• Osteoarthritis (most common according to arthritis foundation)

Facts;

• Arthritis can effect any joint in the body
• Osteoarthritis typically affects people older than 40 (American college of rheumatology)
• Affects both men and women equally
• 3 joints it affects; 1^st carpometacarpal joint (joint of the thumb), the distal interphalangeal joint (synovial hinge joint; tip of the finger), proximal interphalangeal joint (middle of the finger synovial hinge joint)
• Arthritis describes a condition in which this protective covering and fluid-filled sac degenerate, allowing bones to rub together.
• The symptoms of osteoarthritis are pain, stiffness and swelling at the joints of the fingers or base of the thumb. A bump may even appear at the affected site.
• A person suffering from arthritis of the hands may have trouble pinching or gripping items. Other activities, such as knitting, turning a key or typing, may be impaired.
• There is no cure for arthritis, but there are treatments to reduce the symptoms and improve mobility
• Osteoarthritis; When this happens, the bones rub directly against other bones. This causes structural changes that can be seen on X-rays. Bone deposits orbone spurs known as osteophytes may develop on the edges of the joints.
• According to the Centers for Disease Control, 27 million American adults have osteoarthritis.

SKETCHES 

INITIAL SKETCHES

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 MODELS

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DEVELOPMENT OF MODELS

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DEVELOPMENT SKETCHES OF CONCEPT

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MAKING OF FINAL MODEL

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FINAL PRODUCT

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Facebook Project

The brief was to take an everyday object and connecting it to the internet  (facebook) as a hypothetical way of connecting the object to the internet.

for this project it was run slightly differently to how usual project are run that was based mostly on the exchange students, as 30 of our students went to either Holland or Belgium and we got some of there students to make up the groups. there was 6 people in each group 2 from Cardiff 2 from Holland and 2 from Belgium. This lead to a few extra problems then we usually have to deal with when we usually do a group project, these were usually to do with language barriers, or with the difference of how they tend to run group projects. which made communication and agreeing on an object and design very difficult.

We first started by making mind maps of household items and mundane tasks that we hate doing but have to do, like brushing our teeth or hoovering. We then each choose a room or an item that goes in that room to come up with ideas, once we came up with a few ideas we then shared and chose 2. The first was a fridge which scanned food, to either help you with what was going off or becoming empty or to help you with choosing something to eat for dinner. The second was a doorbell which would send a message to your phone when someone rung it, with a camera in it to allow you to see the person who is outside your door. We chose to go with the doorbell.

we developed different designs for the doorbell, and how the doorbell would work. to make it easier to install and cheaper, we chose to make it a wireless doorbell, that can simply be screwed into the wall and run off battery power. To make the doorbell more efficient we chose to make a hub to go into the house to allow the hub to do most of the work, the hub would allow for the doorbell to remain in a sleeping function with only the sensor to be on at all times so that when someone gets within a meter of the door the rest of the doorbell would activate, this will allow battery power to be saved and make the battery pack last longer then if all the functions were solely in the doorbell.

the knock knock app; allows the doorbell to send a photo of the person who is ringing the doorbell to your phone, it comes ups on your phone like a phone call. with three buttons, an ignore, open the door and speak. the app allows you to open the door even when your not at home whether your just down the road or hours away.

counterbalance lamp

a counterbalance lamp is a free standing or desk lamp that stands and is held up by the weight of the lamp and the balance that is on the opposite end of the pole that has the lamp shade attached to it. this product is more of an asthetic piece then a piece of product that is used for a function. obviously it is a lamp but the counterbalance doesnt have a purpose apart from the fact that it is just an extra piece of the design that helps the lamp to function properly. Obviously there are a lot of different designs for desk or free standing lamps, so why would you choose to design a lamp that has an extra formation to it that has no real function purpose. simple to make something pretty, something that people want to have on there desk or in there living room, then a counter balance lamp would make perfect sense for that reason.

for my counter balance lamp I didnt want to design something ugly and similar to the other products that already exisited, so I thought about other counterbalance products. the first thing that came to mind was other counterbalance products, like geo- balls that help products that drive on walls and will always bounce back to the same side everytime. with that idea in mind I chose to design a lamp with a geo-ball for the bass of the lamp. This meant that you could pull it down all the way to the desk and it would spring back and forth till it would final go back to the original position and remain there. by designing it with a geo-ball as the base it would take up less space on the desk then other counterbalance lamp which tend to take up a lot of space, based on the way they are designed.

100 ideas

100 idea project was a both hard and easy, it was hard based on the fact that a 100 ideas for a mundane item like a pepper grinder is hard, especially when thinking rationally most usefully and function pepper grinders are already in the market. which kind of forced me into thinking of more comical designs on a pepper grinder. Ie most of my designs worked with the typical grinding mechanism but the design that they were shaped in wasn’t typical. when it came to it I probably only had maybe less than 10 designs that didn’t run off the typical “grinder”.

These few designs that were probably as original as you could get someone has probably already thought of but either wouldn’t work or maybe don’t have as big of a market as they should have. I went out of the box a little and thought about what else do you grind and put over food that isn’t pepper…. the first thing that pops into my head is of course salt… but salt is also very boring so I didn’t bother doing that… I one of those people that loves a bit of spice on all my food, also throwing chilli in everything and splashing Tabasco all over the place so i decided to make a chili shaped dried chili grinder. Jamie oliver has a series of flavored slat and pepper grinders but I wanted to design something a little more fun and obvious for the people that just hate spice.

one of the other ideas I had is a grinder for children, i thought about what kids love …. ICE CREAM…. who doesn’t love ice cream, and how do you make ice cream better … with sprinkles or chocolate chips … so I designed a grinder shaped like a unicorn that would essentially throw-up sprinkle bits or whatever you chose to put in it … to make something fun for kids to add to the typical desert and make it fun again.

WILDLIGHT; development

RESEARCH

Above are some images that we found for a mood board, in the images above there are a series of different materials and styles of how these lamps and products were made. Through basic research of both 3D printed and Laser cut lamps and products we were able to decided that we wanted to laser cut our piece, after the original research we liked the look of the animal head ideas (images above) though we chose to combine this animal head idea with a clean cut version. To do this we chose to design the head in a geometric form, like the red bear above.

DEVELOPMENT;

Initially we were unsure of who our target market was, this lead to a lot of different possible designs, the images below are some paper and material models that show experimentation of the design.

The images above allowed me to see how different colours and patterns cut out of the paper came through with different patterns and shadows on the wall . This also helped when coming up with a final design, we decided to keep it simple and let the customer make it a more personal item by painting over the top of the material. This was also made it more appealing to our target market (8+) as it allows them to put there own twist on the product without many restrictions.The documents could be edited to fit in a pattern onto the pieces or it could be assembled then painted, both would be easy to do and would make this product more to the persons liking.  The rendering below is an example of what might have been done if someone was to paint over the top of the product.

As can be seen the elephant head at the top are the design that would be created when our files are printed out, and the elephant heads that are below show what a Boy and Girl might do to them to create there own personal perference on the item. It creates a very different effect and becomes a much more personal item then it was before. Also as the material that is used it Acrylic it is easy to clean off paint from the surface and start over if you have made a mistake or want to change the design that you had put on it in the first place.

FINALIZING THE IDEA

At the beginning of the project we were not only unsure of what age group we wanted to aim this product at but also what design of the head we would use. So we designed several different designs of heads, which can be seen in the image below. However we chose to focus on the elephant head as it was the most well planned out CAD drawing that we had developed and seemed to fit together quite well, though we did make models of the stag head as well.

Even though the elephant head was the best CAD drawing that we had which made it easy to make it still took about six times cutting it out on the laser cutter and trying to put it together to get the final design of the product. This is because this product is quite fiddly and requires a certain touch to put it together. The images above do not do justice to the amount of pieces that there are to put together to form the head. There is in total 89 pieces to put the whole product together, 81 of those are just to make the form of the elephant head for the main part of the lamp. We would of liked to make it easier to assemble but due to the material and the restrictions of the brief we were unable to do so. Though we did find it a lot easier to put the piece together if you tape the group of shapes as they are when you open the laser cutting machine, this way you are not wasting all your time trying to find the right piece to go where as the pieces are not numbered in anyway. That is defiantly one thing that I would do if I did this project over or something similar to this again. Also the bigger that you print it out the easier it is to put together, and vice versa. Another reason this assembly of this product is tricky is due to the angle that the pieces have to form to create the head in the correct shape, we found it hard to create something to stick the pieces together. We thought about different joints, but that would mean redesigning the whole head and every line and decided not to do this as it would cause the angles to be off when we assembled it. We though about pegs or slots but decided in the end that threading wire or thread in holes would be the best idea. As through threading wire or thread it allows you to pull the pieces together as tightly as they will go and also allows the angles that are needed to create the correct shape for the head. It takes a bit more time but it gives an effect to the piece to make it less modern and looks a bit more family orientated, and becomes a family activity putting the pieces together a bit like a jigsaw.

The image above is an exploded view of the head, this shows intercrate the pieces are and that it is a pretty complex design but is well worth the effort to put it together.

The image above is our final piece; which we threaded/ tied together with black wire but of course when making your own use whatever wire or thread you want. We also chose to make our clear acrylic frosted as when doing research into mood and night lighting we found that most of the product used frosted material so that they light became dimmer and didn’t distract people as much, which is very important with the development of mood lighting. It is meant to be used at night, but this is not recommended to be used as a night light, with the light bulb that we are using. As the light bulb we chose is a high powered bright LED, it creates a very bright light which is what we wanted for our product and the exhibition, but if its going to be used as a night light we recommend a dim yellow to red colour tone as this the colour range that indicates to our brain that it is night time.

FINAL PRODUCT

FINAL TOUCHES

We decided to add/ make a logo for the product to make our images look more official, I created the logo, but decided to keep it relatively simple to allow it to be readable and still look appealing one of things that we wanted to communicate through the logo that the product is for kids ( 8 and up). Which is why I used a bright pink, blue and yellow in the logo. Also a bit of photoshoping to create the image below with the family and the product as we were unable to take a real life image of a family using or putting together our product with the correct age group.

WILDLIGHT; finished product