problem
"Develop a concept for a product or system required by a human society who live in habitats on the sea bed"
SOLUTION
Due to the very open brief provided, as a group we brainstormed ideas and came up with our own brief to make the project more specific;
“To design a sustainable versatile solution for lighting the walkways connecting confined underwater habitats.”
Parameters were decided to aid us in narrowing the project down;
- in the development stages of the settlement
- situated by the coast
- 100 m below the surface
- needs to be sustainable
- Indoor lighting
- users are 16-50 year old workers monitoring the settlement for fitness for living
Identifying our customer and their needs is important to help stimulate the design process but also to help know what factors we need to ensure are met with our designs. The PDS (Product Design Specification) shown below has the main points picked out as they were valued with the most importance and will be used to evaluate our designs against later on.
Initial designs
Below are a few of my rough initial concept designs, as a group we had 21 designs to choose from.
Using a preference matrix to decide which design to propose as our final concept.
The 6 most important PDS (Product Design Specification) points were chosen and weighted them according to most significant to compare the designs.
Discussions occurred on which design would be the most interesting to take further as three resulted in the same score.
Final Design
The energy required per person for one step in the walkway was calculated and shown that it is a low energy product meaning that it was easy to make this sustainable. Using the walkway to generate electricity using the currents with a gyroscope, coil and magnets meant that this is a renewable energy source and the excess can be used to power other areas of the settlement.
Calculations into the pressure required to activate the switch was also crucial as we wanted the greatest range of people being able to use it. Therefore, the 5th percentile female weight and foot size were used in these calculations.