1. Describe Your Partner
My partner Lamb is a seventeen-year-old girl. She lives in the Putuo district in Shanghai, where is far away from our school. She just graduated from the special school in Putuo last year. She has a disability of controlling her body well because of hypoxia at birth, but her intelligence is no different from others. She participated in the Hackability in NYUSH before and is enthusiastic about this kind of activity. She told me that she posted a video of the Hackability on his Weibo. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Although she can’t speak fluently, she is very willing to talk to other people. When we asked some questions about what difficulties or problems they met in daily life, she interrupted her mother and told us that there is a gap between the subway and the ground so that it’s hard for the wheelchair to get on the subway. 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 and she has to control her wheelchair.
Their main difficulty is transportation. Lamb’s mother told us that their home is far away from the subway station so that she has to push the wheelchair to walk for more than ten minutes to get to the station. Another problem is that the buses are almost inaccessible to them because of two reasons. Firstly, it’s hard for the wheelchair-user to get on to the bus because of the stairs. Secondly, in most buses, there is no space for a wheelchair, not to mention facilities that help to fix the wheelchair. The third problem is that Lamb wants to go out by herself alone with her electronic wheelchair, but she can’t if it’s the rainy day because only her right hand has force so that if she holds an umbrella, she can’t control the electronic wheelchair.
3. What is your project?
Our project is an umbrella holder that can be fixed in the wheelchair. Lamb can use it if the weather report said that it might be raining when she goes out with her electronic wheelchair alone. She said she will not go out if it’s raining so that this project is just to in case it rains when she’s outside. Her mother should help her to fix the holder onto the wheelchair and the umbrella to the holder beforehand. After she goes out, if it suddenly rains, she can rotate the holder up and make the joint tighter by spinning a turn-knob. Then open the umbrella by pushing it up. If she is not able to do that, she can ask people around for help. Besides this using, Her mother can also use this to hold the umbrella for Lamb when they go out together. Her mother said that she always wears a raincoat but it’s hard to hold the umbrella for Lamb. Therefore, it would also be useful if they go out together on a rainy day.
4. Development Process
This week we still didn’t have our partner Lamb since she got a bad cold. This also raised our awareness than at umbrella is important for her since she will easily get ill if she catches a cold or gets wet in rain. In order to make a joint that is strong enough to hold an umbrella as well as easy to rotate, we tried to use one leg of a gorilla pod as the joint of our holder. We thought the gorilla pod might be strong enough since it can hold a heavy camera. However, the truth is that it’s easy to rotate but too weak to hold a umbrella. Then, we removed half of the gorilla pod joint to make it shorter to make it stronger. Unfortunately, it’s still not strong enough. Therefore, we decided to test on next Tuesday if Lamb can rotate the original turn-knob by herself. If not, she may have to ask other people’s help when using it.
