School Group Design Project – 2015

Creative Discovery: Collaboration

As a team, consider our audience, our ideas, and our experiences, and come up with a theme or guideline for our projects. Explore our options through more research, and work collectively, craft a plan that defines the theme or overall tone of the project we are proposing.
This overall concept was collected into a poster here. The Thesis was decided as design for first-aid kits. But what we want to do is more than design just a first-aid kits box.

Our project began with a discussion about what first aid kits should be. First aid kits help people help themselves, it should provide safe and convenient functions.

We run over the first aid kits around our school(Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) and another University(Dalhousie University) in the downtown; Go to Lawton’s and visit
some offices in the city, find other problems such as box is metal or plastic, might scratch people when they open it. Arrangement of stuff in the box is another really big problem. It is always not easy to find what you need when people open the box, sometimes the bandage and band-aid inside is old and yellowing, people even don’t dare to use them.
When using a metal box and sometimes the box is putting in the corner, it might be dirty with dusty and rusty (see photos below).

Altogether, there are problems listed below:

• Hard to open kit and use tools by one hand
• Confuse using some tools.
• Language barriers.
• Hard to find in dark.
• Cannot use it in a dark situation.
• Arrangement and layout.

From the aspect of user experience, the first aid kits also have many problems.
Firstly, the operation manual is unreadable, which means it needs lots of time to
read it when people don’t know how to tape up the bandage. Secondly, with the small
size, first aid kits are really hard to find in a dark situation.

Design Concept

At first, we wanted to design a portable first aid kit aim at these problems we mentioned before based on the original one.
To solve the arrangement problem, we can use a magnet to fix different items. for the confusion using the problem, we can use the image in operation guidance. we also can change the material of it or we can design a structure that can press to open. For those user experience problems, we can install LED lights on the box to easily find and use in a dark situation.

Improve the program

As we identified the issues of first aid kit, we started to improve the design of it, from the last stage, we have come up with this huge vending machine looking equipment. apart from the basic elements that we talked about before, we need to consider the effort of this machine many adding more functions to make it value its size.

We followed the concept we talked about before and tried to make the first aid machine much easier to access. We classify the functions of the first aid machine and divide them into three sections: operational area, communication area, and wasting area.

The operation area has a wound treatment area and tool area. Each level we designed following ergonomics. For these three areas, we researched human common reaching zone and eye level to make sure every people can access the machine.

In the operation area, people can clean their wounds with normal saline and alcohol. The tap can be switched to choose what people need. On another side of the machine, people can tape up the wound. People can choose bandages and band-aid depends on the condition.

This machine also provides scissors, gloves, and an ice bag. They are widely used in first aid situations. These exits are used for different packages, these packages come from the idea of our previous design, which is the first aid kits design from the original one. In some situations, wounded can not move to this machine, so people can help the wounded to get a first-aid package.

As we know, medical waste should be collected and disposed of carefully. So, we designed a waste bin on the machine. It is on the bottom of the machine, so people can use feet to open the waste bin.

These small designs and details that we made for it will separate into this machine. The idea of three different layers considered the layout from human’s behaviors and combined the supplier and first aid machine together.