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 and can only use her right hand but her intelligence is no different from others. She participated in the Hackability in NYUSH this summer and is enthusiastic about this kind of activity. She told me that she posted a video of her participating Hackability on her Weibo. She is an optimistic and outgoing girl. Although she can’t speak fluently and clearly, 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. She also visited gerocomium as a volunteer to accompany these elderly people. Although some of her abilities are limited, she tries her best to cheer those who need help and does what she can do.
2. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
Lamb’s desire is to go out alone with her electronic wheelchair. One concern is that if she go out by herself and it suddenly rains, it would get her into trouble since she can’t hold an umbrella by herself and she has to control her wheelchair.
Their other 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 subway station. What’s more, because of the bad weather in Shanghai, there are much high-temperature weather or rainy days. It’s always difficult for them to go out in these weathers. Their other 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. They said that if they could take buses, life would be much easier because there are bus stations just near their home. Their difficulty in transportation can be the difficulties of many wheelchair users. This shows that our public facilities should consider more about accessibility to people with disabilities.
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
In the first week, we came up with the idea to make a unbrella holder which can be rotated by Lamb and the umbrella can be opened by simply pressing a button. We drew a sketch and made a prototype of the umbrella holder by water pipe and cardboard, which perfectly shows what we planned to make.
In the second week, Lamb took a trip to Hangzhou, so that we didn’t meet her. We plan to use an automatic opening and closing umbrella to attach to the umbrella holder so that she can use the umbrella by simply press the button since it’s difficult for Lamb to open the umbrella by herself. 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.
In the third week, Lamb got a cold so that she couldn’t come so that we just tested by ourselves without the user. 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 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 wants 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 but also strong.
In the last week, we still didn’t have our partner Lamb since she was still sick. This also raised our awareness that an 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 an 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.
Reflection
This project may not be a success but it’s a special experience. It reminds me of the importance of the user during the designing process. Especially in assistive technology designing, it’s more important to design according to the user’s situation since every user is very different and unique. 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. Also, we can’t conduct the user test without a user and improve our design, not to mention iterate the process of designing. Therefore, although we didn’t get a chance to test our project with the user and make some improvements according to the user’s feedback, it’s a special learning experience. For example, the automatic umbrella which didn’t work as we expected reminds me of the importance of personalized assistive technology designing. People with disabilities need personalized designing since the products from the assembly line always can’t fit their requirements. This motivates me to make personalized assistive design a lot.