Bridge 1- Design Intervention

This project had required me to do research on problems that my partner may have that I can redesign an object to solve. Guo was my partner and she said she had an issue of doing her laundry. She lived far from the laundry room and it felt tedious to do the laundry. I visited her dorm and found that she lived on the 11th floor while the laundry room was in the basement. The problem was that she did her laundry often and her load was heavy so she had trouble carrying it down.

 

Whenever my grandma went grocery shopping, she always brought this trolley cart with her to make it easier to carry items in. The wheels make it easier to transport things because it’s round shape reduces the amount of friction on the ground, making it easier to move.  The cart takes the weight of her clothes so she does not have to carry such a heavy load. The handles allow her to push the cart at a comfortable height. 

 

 

 

But I wanted to reduce the amount of work done for Guo because her hamper might not fit inside the cart, and she’d have to manually take it out of her hamper and move it in the cart. So I wanted to remove the cart so she could just bring her whole hamper with her. Instead I’ve decided to start my redesign on something like this where there was space for her to put her hamper. The platform allows her to just directly put her hamper or anything she wanted on there no matter what shape or size it was.

 

 

 

Preliminary Sketch and design: https://portfolio.newschool.edu/xianyuli/2019/02/10/design-intervention

This is the final design of the trolley designed for Guo.

When I further asked Guo about why she found it tedious to do her laundry, she replied that she had to go up and down to move her clothes into the dryer which disturbs her work flow since she usually did her homework while she did laundry. When I visited her dorm, there was an area on the same floor as the laundry room where people were able to do their work. I thought it would be good for Guo to bring her work downstairs to work so she didn’t have to move that much. The hooks on the back of the trolley are for holding bags to bring anything she needed such as her laptop, homework, or her laundry supplies.

Guo also mentioned that sometimes the dryers do not completely dry her clothes, making her put in extra money to dry it again and also using up more of her time. I integrated a drying rack into the trolley so she can drape her clothes over to air dry. The drying rack is collapsible and can be turned into a flat platform to place her laundry hamper on.

When I was researching types of wheels trolleys, dollys, or carts, I found a design of wheels that can tread up stairs easily. Although Guo only needs to use the elevator to go up, I thought it would be useful to add it onto the design in case she needed to take the stairs. The wheels on their own only need the bottom two wheels to move on flat surfaces. When used on stairs, all three wheels act as one bigger wheel and the spaces between the wheels allow the corners of the stairs to fit through, making it easy to drag up stairs.

 

 

 

 

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