Lamb Group: Assistive Umbrella Holder

Partner Description

Our group’s partner Lamb is a seventeen-year-old girl. She lives with her mon and they live in the Putuo district in Shanghai. It is quite far and it will take a long time for them to get to our campus. She graduated from the special school in Putuo last year. Because of hypoxia caused by the lack of oxygen at her birth, she has difficulties in controlling her body and she can only use her right hand. What is worse is that the ability of her right hand is also limited. Fortunately, her intelligence is at a normal level. She was a participant in the Hackability event of our school this summer and she showed great enthusiasm and willingness to participate. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Even if she cannot speak fluently and clearly because of hypoxia, she loves talking to others. When we tried to communicate with her mother about her needs and difficulties, she was patient and she shared her feelings with us. Besides these descriptions about disability, I found out that she loves drawing and she was really kind. She worries about other people who have disabilities. She wants to help others even though she also suffers from disabilities. She is very warmhearted and participates in lots of public service activities.

Her Needs/Challenges/Difficulties

Lamb wants to go outside by herself. Now she can use her right hand to control an electronic wheelchair. But one thing is that she has no hands for opening and holding an umbrella in a raining case. So she cannot control a wheelchair and use an umbrella at the same time.

Another big issue is that Lamb and her mother cannot use almost all public transportation except the metro. They live far away from the metro station. Lamb’s mother needs to push the wheelchair 3-4km, using 1 hour and a half to bring Lamb to the metro station. However, if they can take buses, it won’t take them too much time.  However, they cannot take buses because it is hard for them to get on and off the buses because there are always a huge gap and depth between buses and buses station and between buses and the ground. It is very dangerous for them to get on and off the buses because the traffic condition is always condition and wheelchair and Lamb are too heavy for Lamb’s mom. So it is impossible for Lamb to go outside alone. Besides, because of the rainy weather and the extremely high temperature in summer, Lamb’s mom needs to hold two umbrellas when they are outside.

Project Description and Photos

Our project is an umbrella holder, which can be strongly attached to a wheelchair handler. Lamb’s family can help lamb setup the device if the weather report says that it might be raining when Lamb needs to go out with her electronic wheelchair alone. According to our research on Lamb’s daily route, She will not go out if it’s raining so that this project is designed special cases: it is raining and she is outside alone. After she goes out, if it suddenly rains, she can rotate the holder to a specific angle and make the joint tighter by spinning a turn-knob. Because Lamb’s mother says that she can open some light umbrella with her right hand. So after adjusting the angle and get prepared, she can open the umbrella. Also, she can ask for help on the street. 

It will be something like this: 

Development Process

First week:

In the first week, we wanted to design everything in automatic function. Lamb can click one button and the device can be automatically opened. Here are the first design:

 

and here is the video of our cardboard prototype:

Second Week

In the second week, we got the material we bought from Taobao. Unfortunately, Lamb took a trip to Hangzhou, so that we could not have a real user test on her. We wanted to use an automatic umbrella attached to the umbrella holder so that she can use the umbrella by simply press the button. When not in usage, the umbrella will be clinging to the handle of the wheelchair. When Lamb needs to use it, she just needs to pull it up and press the button. We planned to use an umbrella-like this in case she will get wet when closing the umbrella. Our challenge was how to fix the umbrella in that position after she pulled it up tightly and to make sure its safety. 

Third Week:

In the third week, we still could not have Lamb for the user test because she got a bad cold. Bad news. 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 exerts 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 activate the automatic mechanism again. But it needs much more strength to pull, which is impossible for Lamb to do that. It’s even difficult for us to pull it back. What is more, we realized that the joint of the holder for rotation is a little complicated, which may be too difficult for Lamb to rotate. Young suggested that we can try to use a guerilla pod as the joint, which may be easier to operate but also strong.

We tried to take the joints of stretchable sticks out and separate the legs of guerilla pods from their main body. Then we tried to install the joints to one side of guerilla pods’ leg so as to make the whole stretchable stick rotatable. We used a small pod for the first try. We successfully connected the joint with one side of the pod leg. But the leg is not strong enough to hold an umbrella. When we straightened up the umbrella, the leg bend, and the umbrella fell down. So the first try failed. For the second try, we used a stronger pod leg for rotating the part. However, we realized that the stronger leg was too big for the joint, we could not connect them together.  It seems that our prototype has been stuck. Also, because of the lack of communication and touch with users, we cannot measure the size of the wheelchair and test the capability of our partner, we cannot promote the progress by ourselves.

Reflection

So the conclusion is that we fail in making a real product for Lamb. But we have tried our best to communicate with Lamb and her mom. For me, it is an unforgettable experience. I realize that in the designing process, the user test is a really important section.  Because in the whole process, we don’t have our users with our designing and making the process, we cannot get feedback from them and we cannot event test our prototypes. So our designing process was stuck for sure. We cannot promote progress by ourselves. Without communicating with the user and observing the user, we are not able to know their real needs and empathize, which is the first step in design thinking.