Archives for "Product Feats"
The Victor Bike: The bicycle goes even greener
For his final project in the University of Montréal’s design department, product designer Christophe Robillard asked, “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself communicate the same message?”
The Victor Bike is his answer to his own question.
By re-conceiving the shape of the frame, reducing the amount of metal used and carefully selecting greener materials and manufacturing processes, Robillard has set a new standard for eco-friendly bicycle design. But it’s about so much more than that, according to Robillard, himself:
Reducing the material weight, optimising the manufacturing process, using recyclable and recycled materials, simplifying the disassembling and the separation of materials at the end of life are technical points which have to be respected during the development of a sustainable product. I believe in Mr. Jonathan Chapman’s philosophy — EMOTIONALLY DURABLE DESIGN — where the object presenting the best environmental qualities are the ones that we love, to whom we become attached and the ones we preserve.
Victor is not only the result of a quantifiable analysis work following a protocol of green engineering, but an object that has an irreplaceable role to our everyday life.
I tried to show the elegance and the grace which a bicycle can have through everyday use. A companion to the everyday life that joins us in what I consider to be a respectable and admirable lifestyle. I created an object which harmonizes with the townscape while respecting the charisma and the dignity of the cyclist: such values I hold dearly.
Further reading:
Christophe Robillard’s blog
Flickr images of the Victor Bike
Co.Design coverage of the Victor Bike
Can you teach a robot to flip a pancake?
Even if you put science fiction aside, it’s not hard to imagine a seemingly endless number of real-world applications for robotic technology. But have you ever wondered how a robot learns to perform its duties?
In this video, a robot learns to flip a pancake using “reinforcement learning” after having been guided through the move by a trainer (who used “kinesthetic teaching”). It takes about 50 somewhat hilarious attempts before the Barrett WAM 7 DOF manipulator gets the knack of it.
The work is being done by Dr. Petar Kormushev and Dr. Sylvain Calinon at the Advanced Robotics department of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova, Italy.
Adspecs oil-filled eyeglasses: A vision for the emerging world
Here’s another one in the category of products that *really* make a difference in the lives of users. Atomic physicist Joshua Silver has developed “Adspecs”—fluid-filled adjustable eyeglasses—and with his organization, The Centre for Vision in the Developing World, is distributing them to needy people in developing countries around the world.
The design is simple: Plastic glasses with flexible plastic lenses filled with clear oil. The user can adjust the amount of oil in the lenses using syringes attached to the arms of the glasses. Once the user has dialed in the correct amount of oil, he or she can remove the syringes and set the glasses to a permanent prescription.
Because the user can self-set the eyeglasses, usually in a matter of minutes, the need for a trained professional to fit them is removed.
According to the Centre’s website, the need for eyecare in emerging countries is stark: In the UK, there is 1 optometrist for every 8,000 people. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s 1:1,000,000. So far, more than 30,000 pairs of Adspecs have been deployed worldwide, and Professor Silver has an ambitious vision for the future—one billion people to get the glasses they need but lack access to by 2020.
Another pressing goal for Silver and the Centre is to dramatically lower the cost of producing the eyeglasses. Right now one pair costs around $20 to produce, and the project must rely on donations to offset these costs. Silver wants to get the cost down to $1 a pair.
There’s no clear plan yet for bringing down the cost, but Silver is optimistic: “Work is going on on several new designs, and further work will be required to get the costs down. The truth is that there is, at the moment, no device that can be made for a dollar in volumes of 100 million. But I am entirely confident that we can do that.”
See Adspecs in action on the Colbert Report.
Redesigning the coffee cup
The betacup is a recently completed competition to re-imagine a coffee cup with reduced environmental impact. As many as 58 million coffee cups are discarded every year in the United States alone, and along with most of them, a sleeve that protects the holder’s hands from scalding.
The proposed solutions offer a range of great ideas for how to approach the problem, from the Karma Cup’s social engineering angle to Miller Creative’s Radial Fin Cup with an integrated insulating sleeve design.
The Karma Cup uses social engineering to increase the use of reusable cups and therefore reduce waste:
Miller Creative’s entry reduces waste by integrating the protective sleeve, using biodegradable and renewable resources for the rest of the cup and employing a manufacturing process that does not require glue:
The betacup contest was sponsored by jovoto, an organization that describes itself as “a marketplace for creative concepts [that connects] those who have ideas with those who need them, providing the necessary tools to make the process fun and fair.”
The betacup entry ranked #1 by the jovoto community is a 100% biodegradable cup made from rice husks and available in a disposable or reusable version. (The reusable one even comes with an RFID sleeve that would replace the prepaid payment card.)
See all betacup entries on the jovoto website.
Letting nature inspire your product design
If you’re facing a tough design challenge you may want to look to nature to see how millions of years of evolution have addressed a similar problem. Biomimicry (which Marc mentioned in a blog post about tools to help design more environmentally responsible products) is the mimicking of nature to solve engineering or other human problems. The field of robotics in particular has been yielding some very interesting solutions to challenges of locomotion and range of motion. Here are a few of my favorites:
This perching unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) relies on a claw design similar to a small bird, enabling it to perch on vertical surfaces.
The Stickybot mimics a gecko, enabling it to climb smooth vertical surfaces.
This robotic handling system gets a greatly expanded range of motion by mimicking an elephant’s trunk.
With fluid-based muscles, this system mimics the muscle structure of a human.
To learn more about some of these (and other) projects, visit the online home of the Stanford Biomimetics & Dexterous Manipulation Laboratory, which designed the perching UAV and the Stickybot.
The SawStop: Product design with a purpose
If you’ve never seen the SawStop table saw in action, it’s worth watching this video for the sheer engineering vision it took to pull this off…. This is magical product design that changes lives.
P.S. The story of SawStop is another one for the build-it-yourself annals — the inventor of the technology originally planned to license the SawStop feature to other table saw manufacturers, but when he was unable to reach agreements with any of them, he decided to take matters into his own (five-fingered!) hands and design, develop and manufacture a cabinet saw that had all the features and precision he’d ever wanted.
The old ways are sometimes best (or at least really cool)
Most umbrellas today are cheap – literally and figuratively. They turn inside out at the slightest of winds. They are given away to advertise everything from tequila to the World Wildlife Fund. The handles are molded plastic, the spokes are pliable pot metal and the mechanisms seem to stick more often than not. They seem to come in one of two types – the giant golf umbrella or the tiny push-button umbrella – and the mechanisms that drive the raising and lowering of the canopy are familiar, yet unremarkable.
In contrast, please let me introduce you to an old-fashioned umbrella mechanism with style and superior utility. The umbrella in question was produced in 1957, by a company called PJK, and the mechanism patented. The umbrella line is called “Touch and Go.” It looks like this:
Beautiful, isn’t it? And strong. This umbrella has never turned inside out in my experience, and it has been used in blustery New England weather. The spokes are thick, with a rectangular cross-section, and oriented such that the bending moment to flip the umbrella inside out acts through the long axis of the rectangle.
The true genius of this mechanism though, is the tensioning system. Rather than employ a spring inside the umbrella shaft, this umbrella uses the spokes themselves to generate tension. Look again at the detail picture. The spokes are aligned in pairs and when force is exerted on the tip of the umbrella, the pairs are compressed, bowing the two sides out to form the lovely petal shape you see in the photo. That petal shape is a pair of loaded leaf springs. The spring tension is then captured by a trigger-style mechanism at the loaded point.
The umbrella closure is the most impressive part of the mechanism operation. Upon hitting the button, the leaf springs are released, resulting in lightning-fast contraction of the canopy. The canopy snaps back so quickly that a majority of the water is left behind. The canopy is left damp but not dripping.
I found this umbrella in a thrift store 20 years ago – the handle you see here I machined myself, when the old one finally cracked. This umbrella is a product both hardy and beautiful enough to be worthy of reworking, enabling true “green” behavior – repairing rather than throwing away for a cheaper new version.
This old-fashioned mechanism is almost certainly more difficult and more costly to manufacture than the mechanism that has become the norm. But in this case, what we have given up in our quest for a cheaper utilitarian product is both beauty and superiority of function.
Follow up: The Adidas perfectly round soccer ball—do sports and business mix?
Earlier this year, I posted a video of the production process for the revolutionary Adidas Jabulani soccer ball to be introduced at the upcoming FIFA World Cup.
Now, on the eve of the tournament, several players have begun voicing strong concerns about how difficult the ball is to control and how unpredictable it is in flight.
Most of the criticism has come from goalkeepers who claim something to the effect that “they don’t know where the ball will be.” But especially interesting are the comments from US starting goalie, Tim Howard, about 45 seconds in to the video linked above, where he acknowledges the reality of “soccer economics”: That shutouts don’t sell tickets. If you’ve ever wondered how product design, culture and economics overlap, the unfolding tale of this soccer ball is the story of their collision.
Business being business, Adidas was quick to respond: The issues the players are seeing are all due to altitude, not the ball itself. And lined up behind the company are a few players who have defended the ball: Kaka, Frank Lampard and Michael Ballack most notably. But—they are all sponsored by Adidas or play for an Adidas-sponsored club. Coincidence? Probably not. (Adidas is thinking about soccer ball sales, after all.)
Ultimately, the only one to settle this may be the designer of the ball himself, an Englishman named Dr. Andy Harland. And for what it’s worth, not only does he acknowledge the idiosyncrasies of the ball, he has offered to provide tips to his national side in advance of their opener against the US for how to best take advantage of the ball’s unique properties.
Whatever the effect of the ball, it was already shaping up to be a very exciting World Cup: It’s the first time the tournament will be hosted in Africa (South Africa) and several African teams (Ivory Coast, Cameroon and Nigeria) are fully capable of a deep run. Hopefully the games will be decided on merit and not on the erratic foibles of altitude and a perfectly round soccer ball.
The Sally Centrifuge could save lives in developing countries
Two Rice University students have created a low-cost product that could allow doctors to save lives in developing countries. Sophomore Lila Kerr and freshman Lauren Theis assembled a working centrifuge out of a salad spinner, some plastic lids, combs, and yogurt containers. The “Sally Centrifuge” could be an invaluable tool for clinics in the developing world, enabling doctors to separate blood without electricity, to detect diseases like anemia.
The team’s co-advisor, Maria Oden, said “Many of the patients seen in developing world clinics are anemic, and it’s a severe health problem. Being able to diagnose it with no power, with a device that’s extremely lightweight, is very valuable.”
Traditional centrifuges can cost thousands of dollars, making them inaccessible for clinics in many parts of the world. The Sally Centrifuge costs about $30 in parts, including the spinner.
The students will be field-testing the product this summer on patients in Ecuador, Swaziland, and Malawi as part of Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), Rice’s global health initiative that brings new ideas and technologies to underdeveloped countries.
Read more at mditv.com.
Track this! Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is everywhere
If you have ever purchased a DVD, you may have noticed a sticker with a barcode and a metallic ring of some sort attached to the DVD or packaging. That sticker is an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag, and this technology is becoming increasingly cheap, versatile, robust and ubiquitous.
RFID is basically a 2-part system for tracking items (objects, people, cars, you name it), consisting of a “tag” and a “reader.” The tracked item is tagged with a small passive electronic chip and an antenna that can be powered and read by passing though a magnetic field. The reader, usually a gate or a mat, generates a field that can pick up tags within about 3 meters and collect information stored in the tag (e.g. serial number, lot, etc.). This technology gained initial market traction for inventory control and theft prevention but as the technology has become smaller, cheaper, more reliable and more easily packaged, it is popping up everywhere.
The next-generation RFID timing tag from ChronoTrack
Take marathon race timing: A company called ChronoTrack Systems has taken RFID technology developed by Impinj Inc. and developed a disposable race day timing device, which I used during the recent Inaugural Oakland Marathon. That timing tag was a thin flexible strip that attached in a loop to the laces of my shoe. The next-generation timing tag from ChronoTrack (available this quarter) is integrated right into the race bib and requires no assembly at all. These new tags weigh essentially nothing and sell for roughly $1.25 in volume. Bob Finnegan of ChronoTrack explained that since the days of inventory control usage, the read rate of the chips has improved to nearly 100%. (As he put it, ”If a person has run 26 miles, we’d better capture their time!”) Best of all, the chips don’t need to be collected at the end of the race like RFID chips of old, saving runners time and race organizers money and manpower.
In addition to improved performance and cost, the chips can also be customized to withstand harsh environments. RFID is now used to track critical equipment in war zones (Iraq, Afghanistan) and disaster sites (Haiti) where weather and conditions are extreme. The Impinj website describes a tagging system for tracking hotel towels and linens that has been tested at up to 200°C (392° F) in washers, dryers and ironing systems. The tag can last for more than 200 washing cycles—pretty tough little tags!—and they look just like regular fabric labels.
Hotel linen labels can include built-in RFID tags
Impinj, the RFID technology company behind ChronoTrack, still makes RF tags for inventory tracking but they and other RFID manufacturers are also integrating the tags seamlessly into products people use everyday. RFID is used in electronic toll systems (e.g. Fastrak, EZPass), injectable subcutaneous pet ID tags and implanted glucose measurement chips in diabetic patients. It may not be long before we integrate this all together and just chip ourselves, go run a marathon, have the race fees automatically deducted from our prepaid bank account, get our race times recorded to our home page and have our blood chemistry analyzed post-race to send us an email with instructions for the perfect post-race recovery meal. Hmmm, I see a booming business here!
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