Gardening & Product Design
For our first unit of Design & Engineering we focused on how to incorporate empathy into the design process by innovating a gardening tool for senior citizens. We started our research for this action project off by gardening ourselves with & without tools and by interviewing gardeners we knew and get their perspective about it and their process. I interviewed Sharon from GCE who explained her process as, “every morning, because we have water every morning, so I get up and I actually take my walk first I walk my dogs and then we come back through the back gate and we have three gardening places. So along our fence, we have a. A standing guard and bit, then we have a bucket garden, so we have like these buckets that we like their Home Depot buckets and they're filled with dirt and we've planted things in them.” Throughout the unit we learned to put ourselves as designers into product design. When picking my tool for my action project I chose to go with a tool that I had little familiarity with. For me that was the tree pruner, my impressions noticed that the tool was really heavy and mostly made of one material. I decided to innovate this tool by changing the pole material from fiberglass to aluminum to make it more lightweight and easier to carry for senior citizens due to deteriorating muscle mass that comes with age. Another design choice I made was to add rubber grips to make the pole easier to hold and cause less strain on the hands. A final design choice I made was to make the pole extendable to make it easier to store, most tree pruners are 14 feet long which can make them hard to store in a room, so I made it easier to store by adding a button that lengthen and shorten it. The main purpose of a tree pruner is to be able to reach branches up in trees to cut them down.
During the unit we also learned physics concepts like vectors and fulcrums & levers. A tree pruner is an example of an inclined plane because the blade is used to separate the branch from the tree. It is also a class 1 lever because the user's hand acts as a fulcrum to saw the wood down with the work load on the opposite end. The pruner has a force that is back and forth, or push and pull, so it goes back and forth between the branches.
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