Day 29 -IP / Field Clash

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Howdy, Well today has been fun, while I have been working on my presentation of my surprising project – Survival of the Fittest, it seems that I wont be presenting it yet. As part of our product design programme, we have been enlisted in the university’s Intensive Programme, an international 2 week module where we are going to be working together with students from other European universities to solve a social problem. Whilst this does seem like a very interesting opportunity, it has happened to clash with our presentation day and confusion was sure to set in. Essentially, I missed my first IP lecture as I was following an email that informed me that I did indeed need to go to the Llandaff campus to present my project, unfortunately I was then told that I should return to the IP lecture at Howard Gardens, despite the fact that I was […]

Day 26 – Survival of the Fittest – Predator

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Howdy, So I have compiled my ideas into a solution to my ethically unsound problem. I call it the predator – a quadrupedal robot that helps you to stay fit by chasing you down at the speed you set, for the time you set. If the predator catches you, it uses a front mounted low voltage stun gun to ‘encourage’ you to continue. The predator is reinforced by a mandatory government issue wrist band, which ‘ensures’ you remember to keep fit by setting a schedule based on you age and fitness level, then reinforces the schedule by using mild electric shocks, varying in severity depending on how badly you stray from the schedule… The predator would be based on the Boston Dynamics ‘Wild Cat’ prototype: My design would be to create a commercially reproduce-able government issue version of the Wild Cat with a newly designed outer casing and stun gun […]

Day 24 – Natural Selection & Survival of the Fittest

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Howdy, So I have been thinking a lot about what possible problems could be ethically unsound… My main avenue of thought has landed upon the controversial stance of survival of the fittest within modern society. Essentially, the problem I have identified is that natural selection and survival of the fittest has been dulled by the relative safety and ease of life offered by modern technology and current society. There is little incentive to gain or maintain fitness levels, it is too easy to cover all basic needs and wants and it is too easy to survive, where in nature, you would die. Essentially, these factors would, according to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and the theory of Natural Selection, mean that humanity is working against it’s biological advancement by making the world easier to cope with, instead of evolving to cope with it’s problems. I feel that this problem could […]

Day 22 – Second Tutorial

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Howdy, Today I had my second tutorial of the module, which was with Theo Humphries. I talked through my process with Theo, telling him about my weaponry idea and how I decided against it and ended up moving on to the military idea and then the exoskeleton design. Unfortunately, I could tell from the start that Theo wasn’t totally on board with my idea, or at least he didn’t feel it was a solution to the surprise me brief. Theo reiterated to me that the brief was to create surprise by doing something that a product designer wouldn’t normally do. I agree with Theo that my exoskeleton design isn’t a particularly surprising product design creation, though I did explain to him how I felt about the module. I explained how the module wasn’t really what I had in mind and that it wasn’t really the module I would have chosen, […]

Day 19 – Further Development

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Howdy, Over the past two days, I have been developing my exoskeleton idea. The biggest problem I have found is being able to provide enough torque to turn the joints on the arms and legs, whilst only using a small motor and power supply. I have the outline shape that I want the design to have and a few ideas about how I could solve some of the design ideas I had when I originally thought of the idea. My main idea is to have a one size fits all armour section, with an inflatable internal pressurising section which would include a bandage and would allow the armour to fit to any arm size and to apply pressure to any wound they may have. The rotation mechanism for the elbow section would be a large cog fixed to the forearm section and a worm screw and motor attached to the upper […]

Day 17 – Motorized Brace for Wounded Soldiers

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Howdy, After my recent turnaround, I have been looking to design something to aid a soldier in a variety of problems. I have finally decided to focus on the specific problem of when soldiers are injured on the front line and need help to get back to base, which can endanger their comrades an waste a large amount of time and can cause more damage than the injury itself. My design is currently in its early stages, however my idea is to essentially design a modular set of powered exoskeleton parts, which could be attached to the soldier and aid movement of damaged areas such as the shoulder, elbow and knee whilst maintaining a brace over the area to prevent further injury, a painkiller to alleviate the prohibitive effects of pain and a tight bandaging feature to reduce blood loss. This is an area of design I have a huge […]

Day 15 – A Slight Turnaround

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Howdy, Over the past few days, I have been thinking about what it is that I would actually create a product for. Though of course this is leading me to think of creating products to solve problems, which does in a way go against one of my ideas of creating a pointless product, however I am finding it difficult as a designer to create something that has no use, as I cannot as a designer, create something that doesn’t solve a problem or help someone with something. This has lead me to create a problem areas sheet. To maintain the idea of ethics in educational design, I decided to mainly focus on military problems, breaking the problem areas into 3 main sections: – Infantry problems such as protection from Injuries, Gunfire, Improvised Explosives and close quarters combat – Vehicular problems such as the fragility of aircraft, Improvised explosives, fuel and […]

Day 13 – Paradigms

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Howdy, So since my last post, I have been exploring the many paradigms associated with Product Design as well as furthering my research on ethics. My main finds on the paradigm front have shown me that Product Design relies heavily on a high use of technology, broad ranges of products on a set value scale, new materials and processes, planned obsolescence and consumer co-creation/product customization. Whilst I knew the majority of these already, having them listed makes it far easier to design a product that would invert these paradigms and become surprising. If I were to create a product that clearly challenged then paradigms of Product Design, it would need to be be basic and rudimentary, a single on off product, use older obsolete materials and processes, be long lasting with no direct successor and have no consumer input or customization. Whilst it is true that creating a product such […]

Day 9 – A Further Thought on Weaponry

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Howdy, Since yesterday, I have been thinking about what could maintain the surprise of weaponry without defaulting to the obvious idea of a gun. This triggered a thought that I should focus on the most unethical kind of weapon possible, a weapon so unnecessarily sadistic and so unlawful that it would be sure to instil surprise upon all spectators. As such, I have started thinking about what exactly would make such a weapon design. Ranging from toxic use of chemicals, to sadistic use of torture weapons. This lead me to finally realise that this avenue of design was becoming more and more ridiculous and I would end up simply creating a design proposal for some absurd weapons, which in my opinion, isn’t really that surprising… Since this new revelation, I have decided to scrap the idea of designing a weapon proposal in lieu of designing another kind of unethical product, […]

Day 8 – First Tutorial

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Howdy, Today was my first tutorial of the project with Professor Steve Thompson. I discussed my weaponry idea with Steve, who thought it had potential. It was nice to have some feedback as I have been feeling a little uncertain about this whole project. Steve thinks I am definitely heading in the right direction and has told me to keep pushing the boundaries of what is ethical in product design. He thinks that the ethics stance is excellent, especially with regard to product design as it could create some real innovation. Steve was adamant that everything has become so ethically sound now, that most products have become boring giving the example that his phone has to auto focus and go through multiple pieces of software just to take a picture, when in fact he misses the old camera phone images which were blurred and bad quality. I must admit, I did […]