1.Describe your partner
Something new we discovered about our partner Lamb is that she is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities. I saw in her mother’s Wechat moment that she donated five boxes of gifts to the blind people to try her best to cheer those who need help.
2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. If she go out by herself and it suddenly rain, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself since she has to control her wheelchair and she can only use her right hand.
3. What is your project?Development process. Include photos and video(s)
Our project would be an umbrella holder that Lamb can rotate by herself. We got the automatic umbrella and the umbrella holder that we bought on Taobao last week. When we tested the automatic umbrella, we found out that the umbrella exert a large force during the opening and closing process, which may be too dangerous for Lamb.
Also, once the umbrella is opened and closed once, the user has to pull it back to the original position to open it again. But it requires great strength to pull it back. It’s even difficult for me to pull it back. Therefore, we think it’s impossible for Lamb to pull it back by herself. This would cause lots of troubles, for example if she want to open it again, it would be hard. Another problem we encountered was that the joint of the holder for rotation is a little complicated, which may be too difficult for Lamb to rotate. We’ll try tomorrow to see if Lamb can rotate it and make it tight enough to hold the umbrella. If she can’t, Young gave us a suggestion that we can try to use a tripod as the joint, which may be easier to operate.
Therefore, for tomorrow, we need to let Lamb try if she is able to rotate and tight the joint and open the umbrella which is attached to the holder with one hand. We also need to measure the size of her wheelchair, the length of her arm, the distance that her hand can reach and her height when sitting on the wheelchair. These data are criticle to make sure our project is safe for Lamb.