Remade in China F20

Project Title: Five Minutes – Chair

Project Statement / Purpose:

This project is initiated to help the staff working in our school cafeteria. Through conversations and observations, we got to know that they are required to work for really long hours, around 10-12 hours per day. Also, due to their work property, they have to stand still all the time, which is really tiring. Although there are some places that they can take a rest and there are short periods of time that they can have a rest between two meals, at about 1-2 hours, they can hardly find a way to relax during their long working hours. The only option they have is to stand and cook or stand and serve. Also, we observed that there are a few stools in their workspaces, but they are not comfortable enough, so we wanted to create a backrest for the stools. However, as our research goes deeper, we noticed that these stools were put for the customers, and also because of some obstacles we faced in making a flexible and portable backrest, we decided to make a whole chair. 

Here is the stool we found.

Research and Development:

At the very beginning, we want to simply create a backrest for the stools in their workspace, and it should, in our imagination, be portable and easy to attach to any stool. However, in practice, we found out that it was hard for us, and the clamps that we could find are also too large to be the ideal fit for our backrest. Therefore, we decided to change our project to make a whole chair. And this project is mainly led by Thomas and Luna after the decision of making the whole chair, and my main obligation is to collect the raw materials, categorize them, and finally melt them and press them into solid plastics. 

Since we need to create a lot of solid plastics materials, and time schedule was tight, we decided to use plastic bags as our raw materials, since we thought it would be much easier to be found and collected. However, after the first try, Thomas and I soon discovered that plastic bags are really easy to be shrunk by the heating and melting process, which means the amount that we would need to use for creating enough amount of solid plastics is going to be pretty huge. Finally, after a whole day of experiments and production, Thomas and I create 3 blocks of 1.8cm thick solid plastic bricks rather than the flexible plastic sheets we anticipated earlier. 

Then, after we finalized the raw solid plastics material with Thomas, Thomas and Luna started to make the whole chair. Here is the video documentation. 

 

Conclusions:

Although we faced a lot of obstacles in finishing this project, including finding suitable raw materials, the structure (for making the chair able to sit on), testing the materials, cutting them into small pieces, and finalize all of the assemblies, and that we did suffer a long process of deciding what we should make and change our proposal in the process, we are glad that we finally nailed it. And hope that the techniques we learned from doing this project can be applied in many other fields and many more people’s future study and life. 

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.

 

Journal

If you didn’t get the chance to test your prototype with your community partner, record a video where they test it.
Post on the blog a summary of the feedback you received with the questions you made and answers you got. (Include some photos or any media you collected)
Finally post a short paragraph with your reflection on what you learned in this session and explaining the next steps you are taking to finish with the prototype in the next weeks.

Asking the manager, Mary Kate, to do user testing, however, she said that they are only available next week. So, we are going to have an appointment with them next week. 

Key of Service-Learning

By: Tina (Tianyu Zhang)

Student Learning Goal Area: Approaches, Personal, Academic

What did I learn?

How did I learn it?

Why does it matter?

What might / should be done in light of it? 

In terms of approaches, I learned that the hyphen in the word “service-learning” should be interpreted as reflection and that communicating with a community is never an easy task. Before meeting with the community members, we have to first estimate which direction our conversation would go in, then brainstorm a list of questions that we may ask in the conversation. However, when encountering some shy customers, it is usually not useful if we directly ask them about their needs. Instead, we can start by chit-chatting with them in order to make them relaxed, then ask about their daily schedules, and try to find some problems or questions that can be discovered further. This gradual conversation progress was learned from my first meeting with the cafeteria staff, one of them is active to speak, while the other just simply nodded her head. Therefore, we chit-chat with her a little bit and tried to discover what she really thought about. This method is important not only in the field of doing service-learning but can also be applied to all kinds of negotiation and communication in which you need to deeply understand the other’s thoughts and specifically raise your proposal. 

In terms of personal, I discovered that I am sometimes too aggressive and too urgent in expressing myself and convincing others. I did not sense that it was a problem before. I am not extremely extroverted, actually, sometimes I was even a little bit introverted, however, maybe because of the personal experience of always being an emergent leader in the group, I tended to get used to the outcome that everyone would agree on my decision. This time, in the group, I met a girl who also shared a strong personality with me, and because of our different values and understandings, we often have conflicts in our decisions, and we cannot even convince each other. This makes me feel that I may have stayed in my comfort zone for too long, and have forgotten the feeling of being convinced by others. Therefore, I tried to reflect on myself and warned myself about being patient in listening to others’ opinions, being an active listener. I think this is really a meaningful experience for me to get a better understanding of myself and grow up to be a better me.

Last but not least, in terms of academics, I learned that the process of making a product is never an easy task. It contains many steps, including doing background research, doing material experiments, making prototypes, getting feedback from users, and polishing products. I learned the whole process during this course. Following the steps that the professor assigned us, I experienced how hard but excited the whole process is. And I think with this experience, I will be able to produce more products that I want to build.

Question Guide (Both English and Chinese version attached, since our targeted customers only speak Chinese)

General Questions

What is your first impression of seeing this chair back support? 

您好，方便简单说下您第一眼看到这个座椅后背的感受么？

Can you describe what excites you or confuses you at your first sight of seeing this?

您能简单描述一下看到这个座椅后背时，有什么地方是您激动或者疑惑的么？

Specific Questions

Actually, we designed this with the purpose of making a short time of relaxation more comfortable. Do you feel like that will improve your current relaxation conditions? 

其实，我们设计这个座椅后背的初衷是为了能够让你们在短暂的休息时间里休息得更舒服一些。想请问您觉得这个设计能够改善你们的休息条件么？

This back support will be attached to the stools downstairs. Do you feel like that will be useful for you?

这个座椅后背会被安装在b1食堂工作区域的那个小板凳上，你们觉得这个设计对你们来说会有使用价值么？

Open-up Questions

This back support is now simply made of used plastic bags, do you feel like that will be comfortable for you, or do you have any other suggestions or functions that you hope this back support can have?

这个座椅后背现在只是简单的用废弃塑料袋编织而成，你们觉得这个靠背对你们来说会舒服么，或者你们有没有什么其他的需求或建议？

Presentation of Experiments

At the very first beginning of doing experiments, we felt a little bit stuck since we could make decisions on what we should do for our final project. The case of Sproutworks is very unique, they have a very strict set of rules, and their working schedule is very much in order, during the conversation with them, most of the ideas they put forward are about the garbage classification problems and metal cups’ recycling problems that they identified in this campus. However, based on the course initiatives mentioned from the start of the semester, we believed that we should design something for the staff, therefore, we continued meeting with them, making observations during their working shifts, and asking them for more information. That process lasted for a long time. Since we had not finalized our project proposal, we could only do the experiments with materials that we possibly would use. Later on, we finally had a rough image of what we are going to do, back support for the Sproutworks staff. 

In order to make back support, we need several elements, things to support the weight, joints that connect the back to the stool, and the back. For the back, we do not want to make a still one, instead, we want to design some shapes that can be comfortable for the users. However, making a back with curves requires a lot for making the modes. Then, we thought of making a cushion to make the back support softer, however, then the back support would be hard to fold, which violates our initiative of designing that. Finally, inspired by professor Marcela, and based on some researches that we did, we decided to use webbing technology to make soft, recycled-plastic-made stool back support. 

Plastic bags:

We tried to master how to make several layers of plastic bags flat enough with the use of a heat press. From the observation in lecture experiments and our own experiments, we found out that it is hard to make layers of plastic bags flat using the heat press. 

Foams: 

We tried to add some foams into the plastic bags to make the materials softer and flatter. 

Experimentation on the backrest

We pick to webbing technique overwrap or cross. Since this will minimize the number of plastic bags or foams needed, and we do not have too many in the trash. Webbing also provides the flexibility needed for the backrest.

Fails: with only plastic bags, the back doesn’t have the necessary stretch or flexibility, this affects the comfort and also the aesthetics of the chair.

Solution: adding two layers of foam on front and back provides a bit of “cushion” to the structure, and enhance the flexibility of the web.

We also experiment with the temperature of the pressing machine to create a better structure.

Overall: the webbing technique helps turn something that looks more fragile and like waste into a pattern that could be a part of a new product like a backrest. We are still finalizing the design, so we could move on to experiment with the stem, etc

To make webbing, we tested which width would be the best suit for our project. 

Here is the lab report.

After we received the feedbacks for our presentations, we decided to work on a few more experimentation for the backrests’ sustainable material:

This time, we didn’t mix different types of plastics, since it won’t be recyclable after usage: so we made three types of the press: plastic bags(HDPE), “smoother” plastic bags(LDPE) & foam.

So for HDPE, it was the most common cause for grocery bags like ‘Hema’, the polymers are in chains and floats parallel to each other. As there is very little branching, there is not a lot of stretching for them, even when we heat press it at around 180 degrees. After heat-press, the 5 layers of HDPE also become the thinnest in our experiment (plus it has the least flexibility).

For LDPE plastic bags, we tried the mall’s supermarket bag, they felt smoother in texture since the polymers are in branches. After heat press at a similar temperature, it melts similarly to HDPE plastic bags, but it has a more distinct texture and could be smoother if we smooth out every layer. It also has a bit more flexibility, we will possibly use this material for our later prototype for webbing.

And for the foam, we understand that it will not be recyclable after heating, but we decided to experiment with it. Foam has a higher melting point, so we try 220 degrees, with a similar number of layers (5). Foam requires a lot less heating for it to melt, and the final result provides a smooth and interesting pattern. It has a leathery feel for the material, while it might not be sustainable, but it can be an option if we have a lot of foam trash in storage.

Something in common: for each layer to truly compress and mix, the final material will be very thin nonetheless how many layers we added. (we find that 5 or 8 layers create similar thickness at the end.)LDPE plastic bags will be most suitable for webbing.

For the next step, we want to create 4 sheets of LDPE and create webbing strips that are about 40 cm in length and 2.5 cm in width. We find 2.5 cm to 3.5 cm in width would work.

Experimentations after presentation 

foam with three layers of plastics in between => webbing experiment

We’ve found that the Tmall supermarket plastic bag performs best (provides the texture/surface we desired) from the different plastic bags comparison from last week. So this week, I did further testing specifically on the Tmall bag( I believe it is LDPE, as it has the same texture as the Watson bags, but it doesn’t say what kind it is…) and use a regular HDPE pet2 bag from Aldi. While the melting point for plastic bags is around 130 degrees, we find any temperature under 160 simply cannot fuse the plastic bags properly.

At 145 degrees, while the plastics fuse in certain areas, it is largely un-attached.

At 175 degrees, this specific kind of Tmall bag melts perfectly, but it kind of “over melt” a bit, similar to the example of 185 degrees. Especially, when heat pressing larger bags, we need two times of 10 seconds heat-press, which mean higher temperature like 180 -190 would cause “over melt”, a texture that we don’t desire for our chair back, we want a smoother surface.

On the standard type of HDPE bag from Aldi, it is harder to fuse even at higher temperatures like 160+ degrees, there are many bubbles after the heat-press, possibly due to its polymer organization. Generally, the bag is harder to melt and fuse.

I tried varying the heat press time from 10 seconds to 20 seconds, while it is also a variable for the final result, I find the temperature has a greater effect on the heat press rather than the seconds on the machine.

One thing to note, after the experiment, it is crucial to have smooth baking paper. I tried one paper with a crease on it, and the result has the same mark on the plastic. It is important to get the details right to perform a smoother plastic material for the backrest.

On several layers:

While each layer of the Tmall plastic bag is relatively thick compare to other supermarkets, two layers of plastic bags seem a bit insubstantial and don’t have the leathery feel we tried to achieve. Four layers of plastic bags provide a solid layering. I tried to fuse two plastic bags each, then combine the two different layerings into one four layers plastic sheet. It has good strength, quite surprising flexibility, and the plastics hold together very well after melting at 165 degrees for 10 seconds x 2 times. If we can have more plastic bags available, I will try six to eight layers in the future, given we have enough bags.

Adding colors:

Due to the pattern on these plastic bags, I tried a few different methods to redo the appearance of the sheets. First, I tried spray paint, while it covers the bags’ logo, it adds more weight to the material, and its liquid status might alter the shape of these sheets, make it appears with more creases. But it does add a leathery feel to the plastic sheets. The matte finish also contrasts with the melting plastics’ original texture. We might try paint later on, as spray paint might be a bit too thick and uneven at places.

On the final result:

We will try to webbing technique on both the two layers and four layers of the Tmall bag, both perform better than I expected and has a better presentation than most other plastic bags, such as Aldi’s, where creases is a major issue. We will move forward with the Tmall bag, by pressing two layers of plastic sheets together each time, then build up from there. 165 degrees for 10 seconds x 2 times (times it needed to merge with other layers) is the solution for this type of bag.

 

Next Steps:

Test the solid plastics materials, make modes, and try to produce the back supporting sticks and clamps with solid plastics.