Project Title: Five Minutes – Massage Ball
Project Statement / Purpose:
This project is initiated to solve some practical problems that the staff in our university, NYU Shanghai, are having. We chose the cafeteria staff at our university as our community partner. We raised meeting with them regularly and tried our best to discover problems that need to be solved through casual communication and daily observation. During the process, we found out that they had to stand for pretty long hours during working. Their working hours are from 6:30 am to 8:00 pm and only have less than 2 hours in the afternoon for a short break. During the working hours, they either need to prepare the food, do the cooking, or need to serve food for the customers, all the students, and teachers in our university. And one common problem with that two types of work is that they have to stand. To solve that problem, we decided to utilize the knowledge and procedure that we learned and mastered about recycling different types of waste plastics to produce something that can be more endurable and sustainable while useful for our community partner. Finally, we decided to produce a massage ball that can be attached to the edge of the workbench for them so that they can easily access them in their workspace anytime during long working hours.
Research and Development:
Our main idea of creating this project is to offer a method for the cafeteria staff to relax during their long working hours in our university, NYU Shanghai.
This idea was inspired by the manager of our community partner. At the very beginning, to solve their long working hour problem, I and my teammates decided to make a portable chair backrest for the stools in their workspace to make their resting conditions better. And after we discussed this idea with the staff, they gave me a lot of support and positive feedbacks. And they also randomly gave us one thought. The manager said it would be better if this could be a chair that can massage them. She said it like a joke, but we took the advice pretty much seriously. Then, we started to find out how can we add a massage function to the original chair. Later, we found out that most massage functions are realized by electronic devices, which is not that fit and approachable for us. Later on, I thought of a kind of massage ball that is used to do the foot massage, which is like the picture below.
However, these designs all need to create a mental model first if we want to replicate with the technology that we master of plastics recycling, which is too expensive and hard for us. Then, I tried to design a model that we can use many pieces and slides to create a similar effect to the original massage ball. And here is my design. (the detailed sizes are calculated after the production of the solid plastics that we made)
As for the materials, after a few tries, I decided to select HDPE as our main source of the material. One of the main reasons is that the solid plastics that were melted and pressed from HDPE are the most stable material for the CNC cutter. Since our design needs the CNC cutter to produce a relatively sophisticated pattern for the solid plastics, HDPE would be the best choice for us. Then, we started to find HDPE materials around us. I found out that most bottle caps are made from HDPE, but their bottles are made from PP or PET. But there are also some exceptions, bottles that are used to contain drinks like Yogurt and Coffee have larger probabilities to be using HDPE for their bottles. What’s more, large-volume-bottles are also mostly being used HDPE as the material, such as the 4L Nongfu Shanquan Mineral Water.
Since it is a massage ball, which means being comfortable is one of its most important properties, I decided to sand and polish the whole raw solid plastics that I made. Then, I used the CNC cutter to create the pieces I needed. After that, I used a stick to get all of them together and also added washers between them to fix their positions. Here is the link to my documentation video.
Conclusions:
With this project, not only do we want to solve a specific problem that our staff is struggling with and offering them some practical help, but we also hope that our design can be popularized as a new and sustainable way to upcycle plastics and that our project can raise people’s awareness of improving working conditions and reducing working pressures, which is crucial to today’s fast-paced society.
Last but not least, although we know the fact that this project may not be able to change the whole industry or even the awareness of world citizens protecting and saving the resources, we are still holding the firm belief and sincere hope that the things we are doing are meaningful and will in the future, together with many other excellent environmental-friendly designers, can hit and change the world. The process of conducting a service-learning, choose a community partner, discover their real problems, and do researches to solve those problems are the things that we did and would like to tell the whole design industry. Designing is not only about creating cool and fashionable things, it is more about innovatively solving practical problems that people are facing in order to improve people’s daily life. With the material test, collect trashes on our own, and turn trashes into useful and fashionable things, we want to let the environmental-friendly industries know that there are far more things that we can do than we thought. With professional researches and experiments, we should popularize the knowledge we have to the whole world, and make more useful and provoking projects to raise more people’s awareness of saving natural resources and even engage them to recycle by themselves.
Leave a Reply