1) What have you learnt?
I learnt that the elderly encounter lots of problems and may cause them harm. This links to one of the 10cs on “Citizenship and ethics” as by doing this “elderly challenge”, we are creating products that will benefit the society. This is also part of “Communication”. Sometimes, we would have to ask the elderly what they actually need and not just base it upon our assumption of what problems we think the elderly face.
I have learnt the importance of prototyping and the need to come up with sketches for the product. And the importance of thinking of design considerations to come up with a better product.
We would need sketches of our products to have a feel of what we are making instead of just having an idea and just trying to make it directly. From our sketches, we can see which parts would need to be fixed or adjusted before building our prototype. Even after we built our prototypes, we would still need to improve on it as we constantly get new ideas and not everything would turn out the way we expect it to. This links to “Critical thinking” and “creativity” as we need to think of innovative products for the elderly and sometimes, not all the solutions we come up with work and we would have to think creatively and critically to work our way around the problem and form a better product.
We would need curiosity when designing our products. Instead of sticking to conventional products, we would have to think out of the box and come up with something that has not been thought of before.
Collaboration was another key part to a good product. We needed to seek feedback from our peers to improve on our products. As everyone has different ways of perceiving problems, we would get more innovative solutions by gathering feedback from others.
I realized the need to think of essential and guiding questions to I realized the importance of writing down our ideas in our journal so we would be able to build on it and constantly generate new ideas. This is part of “Commitment”. We will have to constantly document our ideas and and not be lazy. Once we stop writing down our thoughts, it becomes harder to come up with more products or ideas as we forgot what we were working on.
2)What are the difficulties encountered / how I overcame them.
My ramp was not able to touch the ground at first, then I lengthened the range of the sliding joint. After building my first prototype purely out cardboard, I then realized that I would not be able to fit rubber matting in between the sliding joints. I had to cut the joints apart and then made it higher so there was room to put rubber matting in between the 2 sliding plates. Also, due to this, the ramp was rather flimsy when it was fully extended and it always caused the joints to snap. I had to build a flip-down stand to stabilize the ramp. My biggest problem was that as my ramp was made out of cardboard, it would be impossible to show a person using it in my multi-media presentation. So I had to take a still-image of my ramp and super-impose a person and a wheelchair moving up the ramp.
