Steeeve's Documentations

Project title: Custom-built recycled ABS plastic garbage tongs

 

For this project, we worked with our community Fuzhu neighborhood committee and built them a custom-designed garbage tong for the volunteers in the community. Also, this project uses recycled ABS plastic as raw material, which provides insight on how to fabricate with this material, as well as highlights the environmental value of recycling. Throughout the semester, we had multiple meetings without community for testing the design, as well as tons of controlled experiments ourselves to figure out the material we are working with. 

I will divide this post into three main parts: material testing, design & fabrication, and conclusion.

0. Background

First we met with the committee members, Mr. Hu and Ms. Wang, who informed us about their work each day and led us around the community for inspiration. In the process, we learned that there are volunteers who pick up trash around the neighborhood every morning, and the tools they use are not as effective as they could be: they have three pairs of garbage tongs, one is heavy and too short, one is heavier and too long, the third one is not as long but does not work properly

…… So we decided to make them a new pair of custom-built (thumbs up) garbage tongs.

1. Material testing

Since this is a tool, we need the material to be extremely durable, and that’s why we chose to use ABS plastic. We started by testing the properties of this material. We first melted it at different temperatures and see how it melts, and pressed it to see if it can be molded together. After burning two pieces pretty badly, we finally got one working board that looks decent and ready to be further processed. 

The general process of making our material using ABS is as follows:

1. Measure out about 800 g to 1 kilo of the abs raw material. Depending on the need for the appearance, shred or not shred the original material. For a denser, more sturdy board, shredding is recommended.
2. Heat the oven to about 220 degrees Celsius, then put the fabric on the press before putting the plastic
3. put the plastic shreds on the press, roughly forming a shape of the board. Stacking the pile relatively high doesn’t matter as long as it does not touch the upper ceiling
4. heat for about 10-20 minutes, or until the pieces are soft to poking using a stick (please don’t touch them with your hands).
5. Place the spacers of the correct thickness onto the corners of the press, and then put another piece of fabric on top, and press
6. if the shape of the pressed board is less desirable, feel free to fold the board in to form a more uniform shape, and then press again (with the spacers)
7. Also, it normally takes multiple presses for the board to reach the desired thickness, and sometimes the board will go thinner than the spacer, which is an unsolved mystery. 
8. Finally, after pressing, take the board out along with the fabric underneath, press with two larger wood sheets on both sides and clamp to prevent the board from curling.
9. Wait for the board to cool until you can touch it, and take it out of the clamp — you’re done!

1.1 trying to deal with the length problem

we were afraid that our tongs might be longer than the press that we have, so we brainstormed possible ways of connecting two shorter boards, such as heat shrinking plastic bottles to cover or using one piece of melted plastic as glue in between them. Both methods ended up not as effective and sturdy as we wanted, so we decided to just screw the boards together. 

 

2. Design and iterations

we brainstormed about how the tongs should look like.  inspired by some online image searching, we also thought about bending the handle to form a gun shape, or incorporating springs to increase grab force, and so on. Once we finished testing out the first sketch in laser-cut cardboard, we quickly realized that designing the shape ourselves was not the way to go, so we imported an image and traced it in Rhino. We laser cut the pieces out in 5mm plywood, and it ended up way better and actually usable (prototype 2).

↑ prototype 2

We met our community members the second time, shortly after, and showed them our laser-cut prototype and the board that we pressed. They were pretty happy with the result but told us that it could be just slightly longer. So, we altered the design and made it into four separate pieces that can be screwed together (prototype 3). We quickly moved on to machining the plastic board. Luckily, ABS was very easily machine-able despite its toughness, so we quickly made the same design on the CNC machine (prototype 4).

 

Here comes one of our most important challenges. Since the plastic is more flexible than plywood, it gets bouncy and wobbly and easily bent when the piece gets long and thin. One solution was to bend in the tips, but after trying it out on wood, we actually found it harder to use as the tips would constantly dislocate themselves. However, we did try a new design on the handle with the thumbhole (prototype 5) and decided to update the community with our progress.

 

We took the 3, 4, 5 to the community shortly after. To our surprise, they preferred the original handle better, although we did prefer our big-small hole design. Prototype 3 (the wood) was the most well-received, for its comfortable grip and length, as well as its surprisingly effective shape for picking up small objects like cigarette butts.  So, after the meeting, we mainly focused on dealing with the “wobble problem” of prototype 4, as well as some UX issues.

Since plywood is less flexible, we tried to make our own ply-plastic, by gluing multiple thinner boards together (prototype 5). But this provided more chance for accidents to happen, and it also needed the board to be extremely flat, or the glue won’t stick well. So we abandoned this idea. Then we tried to press some plywood to the melting plastic to try and form some sort of “dual board”. It straight up didn’t work…… so after all these, we ended up increasing the width of the middle section (prototype 6), which worked but at the same time made it heavier. However, after consulting our community, we decided it was still going to be way lighter than what they already have. So great.

Finally, with the opinion of the community, we ended up with a slightly flattened design on the top (final prototype/product 8).

 

Team member contribution:

Steve: Mainly in charge of all the CAD design on Rhino and Illustrator as well as fabrication processes, assisted in the documentation processes, partly involved in the whole design thinking and generating ideas for iteration over prototypes, partly involved in engaging with the community.

Scarlet: Mainly in charge of organizing the ideas and keeping clean and complete documentation. Assisted in the fabrication processes, partly involved in the whole design thinking and generating ideas for iteration over prototypes, partly involved in engaging with the community.

Max: Mainly in charge of testing small ideas quickly and helped prune some weird design choices. Assisted in the documentation and fabrication processes, partly involved in the whole design thinking and generating ideas for iteration over prototypes, partly involved in engaging with the community.

 

3. conclusion

Again, our purpose here is to make a product according to the user’s needs as much as possible using recycled materials. I think we did a relatively good job at realizing and addressing most of the community’s asks, (aside from straight-up asking for a wooden one), and where our technologies and material cannot reach, we did sacrifice some other less vital attributes of the whole product, for example, increasing the weight to solve the “wobble” problem, but at the same time increasing the weight as a whole.

What makes me the proudest of is first, we used an entirely new material that no one has ever tested before and we figured out ways to deal with it and get the best result out of it; secondly, we feel very proud of the entire design process, including all the small things we had to consider and all the iterations we had, it really felt like we are getting to a more perfect product step by step.

In terms of difficulties, as I said, working with new material is challenging, but specifically, one thing that annoys me the most is that how there has to be some kind of CNC accident happening on the plastic every time. Although the material machines really clean, it leaves a trail of melted stuff behind which needs to be removed, other wide when the bit hits those they create crazy vibrations, which is a bad thing on the CNC. Other difficulties include the time needed to finish a CNC cut and how much we needed to babysit it; the inconsistent thickness of the plastic board resulting in inconsistency in the final product and others. Most of them we found a solution for, others we found it not really affecting our product to the point that needs to be addressed, so we chose to leave them there due to the time constraints.

about successes and failures I will quote from my last post:

The biggest thing I have learned was how much thinking we have to go through even when we are designing a product as simple as these garbage tongs. The user persona and what things they actually pick up and things like those are highly site-specific, and also working on new material is hard because time should be spent in understanding the properties of it and careful documentation of those properties is crucial. 

For teamwork, I think having three very talkative and action-oriented people is the biggest advantage we have, all of us have ideas and none of us are afraid to just confront each other and be like “hey your idea sucks, and here is how we can improve it”. Of course, we developed this bond and friendship over this semester to even be able to be so straightforward with each other, but in the end, we do feel like a team. We have an idea, we are not sure if it works, but we quickly get to do it and test it out, very little time is spent in discussing and fighting over “could this work?” or “is that what they want” or “is this what Marcela want?” and stuff like this, we do it, we like, and we test it with the community or among ourselves, and we keep moving.

for understanding needs, again we are fortunate to have a community that is very understanding and very direct in terms of their needs and what they expect us to do. so what we had was a bunch of goals we needed to reach, and we are just working towards bringing them to live the best we can one by one.

For our final design, there is one more thing that is a bit eye-twitching for me, that is, because the tips and the handles are cut from different boards, the thickness is different, so the tips don’t align together properly. Also, it would be nice if we could actually have the rubber dip. And to put the cherry on top, I wished there was a more effective sanding and polishing method.

For future students, my advice would be don’t overwhelm yourselves with too many thoughts from the beginning. We used to have five ideas and wanted to do all of them, but ended up almost completely disoriented with the development of just one idea. You will always find that once you get into the design thinking, there are always things you can improve upon your existing project.

In the end, I would say our project successfully provided solutions to our community’s problems, while addressing the environmental issue of plastic pollution by using recycled materials. And the biggest takeaway from this project is “iteration”, which is also what we wanted to emphasize with our presentation in the IMA show. By iterating over and over again on the one Idea we really felt like we have reached the full potential of this product or got as close as we ever could be in the time constraints. I guess it is an important thing to have in product design. This knowledge will keep on inspiring me in my future projects.

 

Finally, here is the link to our final video.

 

 

 

 

 

Personal Growth: what strengths and weaknesses did you learn about yourself? How are you different now?

My strength lies in my skills in fabrication and designing. I am familiar with most of the technologies available to us and that helps us with the making of the project. I’m also fairly comfortable with human interactions but I came to realize how I was actually not as fluent and easy around people as someone like Max, sometimes when we have meetings with our community I find myself just sitting there and listening more than actually talking and communicating (especially with my teammates). However, I’m more comfortable with it now that I have cooperated with our community for this semester. Obviously having a very nice and welcoming community definitely helps, but through that, I have also gotten better at communicating with them in a way that is efficient in learning about their needs, like how we express our questions on the design of our product in a way that’s easy to understand for our communities and the volunteers that we are working with, and also sometimes a chill chat about their and our lives helps to get their talking mood going. So those are some things that I found very useful.

 

Civic Engagement: what did you learn about the approaches of working on a project? For example, teamwork, communication, understanding needs, etc.

the biggest thing I have learned was how much thinking we have to go through even when we are designing a product as simple as these garbage tongs. the user persona and what things they actually pick up and things like those are highly site-specific, and also working on new material is hard because time should be spent in understanding the properties of it and careful documentation of those properties is crucial. 

for teamwork, I think having three very talkative and action-oriented people is the biggest advantage we have, all of us have ideas and none of us are afraid to just confront each other and be like “hey your idea sucks, and here is how we can improve it”. Of course, we developed this bond and friendship over this semester to even be able to be so straightforward with each other, but in the end, we do feel like a team. we have an idea, we are not sure if it works but we quickly get to do it and test it out, very little time is spent in discussing and fighting over “could this work?” or “is that what they want” or “is this what Marcela want?” and stuff like this, we do it, we like, and we test it with the community or among ourselves, and we keep moving.

for understanding needs, again we are fortunate to have a community that is very understanding and very direct in terms of their needs and what they expect us to do. so what we had was a bunch of goals we needed to reach, and we are just working towards bringing them to live the best we can one by one.

Academic Learning: where did the community experience align or not align with the academic content? What have you learned as a result? 

I think the biggest difference is how we want to use plastic but they just want the best pair of tongs possible. because in our meetings they clearly stated that for the same design, the wood ones work better than the plastic. so what we did later on in our final iterations are mainly trying to match the properties of the plastic to woos as best as we can, like all the ideas trying to fix the wobble in the plastic, which is not a bad thing, it just gave us an opportunity to think of different solutions and be creative about it. so in a way this misalignment in turn pushed us to think more and have better design in the end

Journal

If you didn’t get the chance to test your prototype with your community partner, record a video where they test it.

— summary of the feedback from this class:

1. the overall design of the wood prototype is good, looks very aesthetically pleasing 
2. the handle design could be improved in that the loop is too large and hard to control how the clamp opens. 
3. the length is a little bit too short that they will have to still bend in order to pick things up effectively
4. the plastic boards look very sturdy and should be good for the final product
5. concern that it might be heavier than the wood prototypes so need to look into how can we minimize necessary weight
6.  

— questions and insights of further developments:

1. What do the volunteers usually pick up in their working sessions? how is the shape making the process easier or worse?

          Mainly plastic bottles, loose leaves, and cigarette butts, the tip needs to be able to close up tightly in order to pick up smaller objects.

      2. what did they think of the handle? was it comfortable? what suggestions do they have?

          the felt the handle was quite comfortable, but later we found out once the plastic is cut out, the edge is way more harsh than the wood

      3. the average height of the volunteers, how do we decide the right length?

          one member that came to our class said that she was about the same hight as the cleaning ladies, but we still need to let them take the  decision

 

 

 — I will quote the section in my “further developments” section in our presentation that day.

• Community meeting: get suggestions on ideas and discuss other proposals
• Observe/experience trash collection first-hand: acquire UX insights, e.g. finding the most suitable length for volunteer trash collectors
• User testing and improving UX: Handle wrapping, length, handle shape (gun-shaped v.s. Scissors-shape — which confers more mechanical advantage?)
• Aesthetics: Test more color combinations
• Post-processing: Sanding? Spray-painting? Hydrogen peroxide to treat discoloration?

— two questions:
What did you learn about working with the community from today’s discussion (not including the design part)?

the biggest thing I learned was how was I sometimes digging so deep into the technical issues in making the product and I would forget to update our community with our process. Most of the time I don’t feel comfortable sharing something that is in the working process but now I realized that it was very important for them to get to know what we are up to so that they can provide timely aid, but equally important, is an amazing way of building mutual trust and respect with us and the community, by showing some of our struggles and thoughts on the project.  

How are you going to apply the lessons to future collaborations?

we will send pictures in the group chat whenever we implemented an idea effectively and try to pay more visits to the community, we realized that the community is usually quite available — there will always be people around that we can talk to — so we decided to skip the rather complicated “arranging time slots” and to visit them on rather shorter notice (making sure that they will be able to meet at first, of course)

For a project that is so down to the ground, unfortunately, Pinterest couldn’t provide us with too much inspiration with the design. However, we did find lots of variations of the garbage clamps online. here are some examples. 

This one is the closest to what the community was using, the problem of this one is that it is made of steel and therefore very heavy, and the tips don’t work particularly well for what they do. So this provides an example of what we shouldn’t go for. we should probably get a closer look at how exactly the tips don’t work and find ways to improve.

We had this image in our material testing presentation. The inspiration here is to see if there is a way to make the product work better with the human body, there was a saying of “bend the tool not your wrist”, so we can think about if and how we want to possibly bend the clamp for easier user experience.

These two are examples of how the clamping force can be massively increased using the mechanical advantage — if we find it necessary. but at the same time, it is also harder to manufacture and might affect the overall integrity of the product.

the one we ended up using as a reference for our first wood prototype. 

Find References

The stools.

especially helpful when the best quality of our production of recycled plastic is in the form of boards. 

The color pallet.

this is very helpful in terms of thinking about the color matching and the overall aesthetic of our products.

The carton.

thinking about the appearance, we want the project to look like something else, but do not lose some of the properties of its original form. this is a fine line to cross and a hard balance to keep, but those of this one is the place that we are striving for.

Learn from China

Unfortunately we haven’t found any relevant or innovative ways for Chinese people to recycle plastic. Some elementary school or kindergarten would have crafting class for making little projects using cardboard and plastic bottles and that’s about it. Nowadays most households would simply put them into the recycle bin and wait for the garbage collector to collect them.

Observe

Waimai boxes, plastic bottles, Taobao packaging, plastic shopping bags (fabric or straight plastic), trash paper and cardboard, coffee cups……

Experiment

*In the process

Meeting with Community Partner

*In the process

With your group

(lab report)

PROJECT TITLE: Bon Appétit 

           

PROJECT STATEMENT:                                

For our installation, we wanted to discuss the problem of plastic pollution,  especially in the oceans and towards oceanic creatures. In our readings and research, we came across again and again how ocean creatures mistaken plastic for food, and died as a result of accumulating too much plastic in their digestive track. So, we decided to raise awareness of this problem specifically and try to do that empathic way, that is, to try to give off a feeling similar to what the sea creatures would feel — mistaking plastic for food.

 

DOCUMENTATION

 

So at first, we gathered a bunch of plastic garbage from everywhere, including r

andom bottles, coffee cup caps, plastic packaging and even abandoned 3d-printing filaments. And then from there we started thinking about what food we could make out of these. We were going for foods that are easily recognizable, at least to the people from where the food originated from. So we ended up making stuff like burgers, hot dogs, a plate of spaghetti, and a plate of sushi. We used mostly glue guns and scissors for the job, and tapes from time to time if we need the thing to stay a bit more rigidly.

 

We then managed to borrow a table and several chairs and cooking utensils, and we managed to put together a proper dinner table and successfully recreated a dining environment.

 

 

 

 

 

CONCLUSIONS:

Again, the goal was to try and give people the feeling that we thought the sea creatures would feel. After mounting the installation, we really felt like the feeling are accurately presented, especially with the addition of a dinner table and chairs, as well as the utensils, which are NOT plastic. The same surroundings, the same plates and utensils, but just the foods are in plastic. However, one thing that I feel like lacking is acknowledging the sea creatures in some way other than writing about them in the description, I feel like there might be something to improve on like writing a phrase like “POV: you are a sea turtle” on the table or something. 

So by raising the empathetic feelings instead of directly telling and warning people about the problem (like saying “the plastic is gonna end up in your body blabla”), we argue that it would more successfully hit the feelings and really make people want to do something about the problem.

The difficulties creating the project is mainly finding the materials that have enough resemblance to the food we are creating out of it (to minimize the modification on them and frankly, make our job easier), but not enough to the food, so that the viewer could still tell that it is made out of plastic garbage we would throw away.

One of the takeaways is that maybe there are more effective ways of presenting the project so that it “packs a little bit more punch”. In another word, making it a little more visually interesting or fun to look at, for example we could still make the foods, but we can also add a model human (?) trying to eat the food, or maybe ourselves could be the ones picking up those foods and trying to eat them. I think this might give the audience more of a feeling that goes “nooooo don’t eat that those are plastic!”.

 

 

 

 

Slides for community presentation ↓

Community Research

For basic brainstorming I have a few directions to start with:

1. Mimicking sea creatures using plastic products, this requires more variety of material collected and has already been done a lot.
2. posing & advocating for good deeds in creative ways
3. show plastic in or as dead animals
4. show a meal/kitchen with plastic as the food with words:”Bon appetite”
5. human tangled with plastic bags/fishing nets

 

For community research we have scheduled a meeting for the coming Friday and then hopefully next week before class. We will be updating to this blog and coming blogs soon.