View our 2020 Swanson School of Engineering Design Expo video!
Our project began with an individual pitching process, during which each student in the class section had the opportunity to initiate a topic. This topic was specifically focused on defining the problem space and avoiding solution ideation.
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A main tenant of Human Centered Design is identifying the right problem before attempting to solve it. I wanted to explore the manual wheelchair problem space because I had witnessed the challenges that the University of Pittsburgh's hilly campus terrain posed to those who are differently abled. Although high-end, electric chairs or custom fit manual chairs improve accessibility, they come at a price which renders them inaccessible to those who need them most.
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After pitching my initial design question, "How might we improve the ergonomics of propulsion and braking mechanisms on a standard manual wheelchair in a cost effective manner?", three other engineering students joined on to my project idea.
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Over the next six weeks, our team (Accelerate Accessibility) continued to employ the Design Thinking tools encouraged in The Art of Making course by conducting continuous outreach via interviews and surveys with real manual wheelchair users and experts in wheelchair biomechanics at the Human Engineering Research Lab.
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We frequently iterated our prototypes in accordance with our outreach findings and ultimately produced a final version which demonstrated our design goals and shows great promise for the future.
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Our team is continuing to develop this project with the Classroom to Community extension program. This is a University of Pittsburgh funded endeavor that encourages students to take their academic innovations beyond the classroom.