Natural Disaster Project: Buddy Bear

Product Service System: Pills Dispenser

The Problems found:

Aging population. And the government are spending a lot on medical needs for elderly people.

According to Food and Drug Administration and research,

People over the age of 65 are the largest group that requires medications.

"People over age 65 buy 30 percent of all prescription drugs and 40 percent of all over-the-counter drugs."

Interactions between drugs can be very dangerous. And even doctors and pharmacist are very careful about it, there are still human errors.

"Of all the problems older people face in taking medication, drug interactions are possibly the most dangerous. When two or more drugs are mixed in the body, they may interact with each other and produce uncomfortable or even dangerous side effects. This is especially a problem for older people because they are much more likely to take more than one drug."

According to research, the average numbers of medication a person aged over

65 take is 6.

"The average older person is taking more than four prescription medications at once plus two over-the-counter medications"

As we age, we start to forget things. And missing dosage of medication can be deadly.

Project 2: Reflection

In project 2, we were to design a Product Service System as a group. It was quite a challenging task, mainly cause it took my group a few weeks to find a problem to design a PSS. It also took us quite a long time to TRULY understand what a PSS is. For example how the PSS can self sustain, what is the product's role in the PSS, how it is just a product with service/it is a product that helps the PSS etc. But after reading books, internet sources, lots of discussion between group memebers and a few weeks worth or consultation with out tutors, we finally came up with an idea. Our main concept were to remind elderly people daily to take their medication on time and with the correct dose. In addition to that, the product that we designed not only will remind the elderly to take their medicines on time, dispense them with the right dosage, but the system within the product will also give information of the medicine that they are taking, side effects, and any complications between all the medicines that they are taking, in order to minimise human errors within the medical field. A simple description about the PSS behind is, the elderly will go to the GP, GP type in prescription to a server that both the GP and the pharmacists have access to, then the elderly will go to the pharmacy, talk to pharmacists about their best option and prescription, get their first 3 months worth of medicine, in our designed medicine jars, then go home and put it into the machine and start using it. Every month, they would have to send the pills box back to the nearest pharmacy and get new jars of medicines, which were sent to the pharmacies by supply warehouses. The warehouse will refill the jars and by heat wash, wash away the barcode that provides information to the product (pills dispensing machine). The whole idea was inspirated by nursery homes. We wanted to give the same care from nursery homes, to the elderlies that lives at home. Within the whole process of the project, we went thru many frustration periods. Like, "OMG, our PSS already exists, we failed" "We can't come up with a shapeeeeeee, what is a modern medical device's shapeeeeeeee?" "Should we do it portable or not? If portable it will be tooooo bigggg" etc. And it almost became a cycle thru the weeks of the project, our mood drops thru out the week, we go to studio on thursday often feeling very miserable, thinking that our PSS sucks and it fails, then after talking to our tutors, we see some hope and get energised to work on it again! At times, I felt, I don't like group work, cause I can't work on my own pace, always need to have group meeting and always have to discuss with group mates. But it was actually really a good experience. Firstly, because there was so much research and work to be done. Secondly, without discussing and talking with so many people, it would be a lot harder to get the concept clear and working. Thirdly, the time we get to spend together as a group and work on something together was really precious, the support we get from each other and the fun time we had.

I think for industrial design students and designers, designing a PSS is a very good challenge. It is because you get to design something that can be shared among people, connects people together and yet it helps the world by reducing waste and carbon footprint etc. To me, it is a new way of design, to design a PSS, you have to truly understand people, you need to talk to lots of people (which were to be the users of your design).

In conclusion, it was a good challenge. Have learned that design is not simple at all, there are so many things that you have to consider, the function, the appearance, the user, the people around the user, the society, the world... However, we did not do a great job in the final presentation, which was a really disappointment for us. If we were to do the project again, we would make a much better and detailed model, prepare and structure the 10min we get in presentation a lot more better. Hope it did not make us fail : ( please don't!!!

Video Reflection 3: An Inconvenient Truth

Trailer of the movie: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjx6KETmi4

An inconvenient truth is a movie of America’s former vice president Al Gore, presenting to us the real truth about global warming.

Ive always known about global warming, always known we must start doing something now. But... only after watching this movie, it truly hitted me that, global warming IS HAPPENING and its happening real fast! Never knew that carbon emission data collection started 70 years ago, and data shows, numbers just kept rising and rising. Scientists had been warming the society about all this for so many years, yet still nothing has done or changed. What are we humans thinking and doing?

From the movie, we learned that only 2 big countries in the world are not listed in the kyoto protocal treaty, an international treaty that aimed to control the emission of greenhouse gases which are causing the climate change. The 2 countries are the United states and Australia!

The animation that showed polar bears for the very first time get drowned and died cause of not able to find ice blocks to land on, gave me huge impact for some unknown reason. I find it really sad to know that every little things we do daily are harming our world largely bit by bit. And when everything adds up, ice blocks melt, temperature rises, polar bears drown, species extincts, diseases develop and so on and on, that everything will soon come to an end. And it is going to be a horrible ending.

And for us, design students, i think its a very important and serious wake up call. For us to understand and take action to do something for our world. In the world of resources running out and material prodcut overload, I truly think rather than designing more stuff that will only end up in the landfill, we should instead design products to help the problem. Let it be recycling or actual something that solves global warming. Because if everyone of us start doing something now, it will make a huge difference!

“Each one of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us has the choices to change that.” --- Al Gore.

Peer comments

Jennifer Widjaja

Gabriel Ly

Greg Shar

Charmaine Chen

Julia Xiao

Natural Disaster Project

Random inspirations #3

HaHaHa, how cuteeee!

Random inspirations #2

"Temp-pack" by Asher Dunn is a shelter cum cart that folds into a portable backpack for quick and easy transportation, designed for disasters victims.

Random inspirations #1

This is pretttyyyyy. This balloon lamp uses an LED light and two coin batteries to turn a balloon into a beautiful source of light, that lasts over 100 hours. But i wonder how long the balloon itself can last?!

Video Reflection 2: The Story of Bottled Water

WOW! The Story of Bottled Water was truly one of the most inspiring video I've watched in a while, it completely changed my perception towards bottled water. Me, being brought up in Hong Kong, had always been taught that drinking straight from tap is no good. This is because Hong Kong's water are sourced from China in old and corroded pipes, which causes the water to have an unpleasant metallic taste, so filtering and boiling is needed to have "clean" water suitable for drink. I guess the bottled water industry seriously did a great job in marketing, for scaring us, consumers to believe in them that bottled water is actually worth to buy, making us think that tap water is not suitable to drink. Other than that, we humans (me anyways) are all super duper lazy, and love to think "if money cant solve it, then its not a problem". Therefore, even thou I have quite a few water bottles at home, I still can't be bothered to bottle up a bottle water to bring with me. As much as the guilt that I feel when I bring my bottle of mount franklin to the cashier, I still shamefully cant be bothered to bring my own water. But after this video, knowing all the plastic bottles will just be sent and buried in someone else's backyard (another shameful example of us using money to solve our own problem) and drinking bottled water is as bad as a pregnant woman smoking, I am definitly going to change my laziness, to help making an effort to make the world a better place!

Apart from the dramatic news that this video delivered me, I'm also very impressed by how marketing can make a huge difference in a product as well. I've always been wondering and complaining about why industrial design students need to do marketing subjects?! Now, I know... for a product or business to be success, marketing strategies take up a big and important role in the process too. To create a problem and to seduce customers. Even thou the marketers created the problem of "tap water is dirty to drink", cleverly, industrial designers took up this point and designed bottles to solve THE problem.

"Bobble" is a water bottle that comes with a colourful filter inside, it claims to take care both our bodies and the planet at the same time.

Eco-redesign

Here is the result of our group.

Video Reflection 1: Giving Packaging a New Life

The videos showed very interesting ways to recycle recycling materials, like paper, glass, aluminium etc. Before viewing the videos, i always thought peeling off labels on cans and plastic bottles or separating colours of glasses are done by human power. I am amazed by how high tec and systematic recycling is.

Although recycling is a great approach, none the less, we shouldnt forget recycling uses up a great amount of energy too. This made me realised, being a designer, apart from designing with more recyclable materials, thinking about using less material will be even better! Truely "Less is More".

To reduce the energy used to recycling, I believe everyone of us should start with taking up the habit of sorting recyclable garbage at home. Like, to have 3 bins at home, for paper, aluminium and glass. Me being myself, although i have a big bucket just next to my bin at home. I am always too lazy to recycle my rubbish, just because sometimes I am too lazy to rinse clean the bottles and cans or peeling off the plastic or metal bits from the papers. And i am always very annoyed bout the fact that, how much rubbish me and my flatmate can produce within 1-2 days, that we have to drag ourselves out to the rubbish room. After watching the videos and reflecting, I promise that i am going to start recycling today and take up the idea of designing with recyclable materials and use as less materials as possible in my future designs!

Ecological footprint

I've calculated my ecological footprint from http://www.myfootprint.org/ and I am kind of surprised about the result. I thought my carbon footprint would be the highest among the other footprints, cause I travel between Hong Kong and Sydney at least once a year. But apparently my food and Goods & Service footprints are quite a lot higher than Australian average. From this, I've learned even the smallest thing in daily life can make a difference to the earth. Like my mum had always been telling me to eat organic food, for less toxin being consumed and unplug switches whenever theyre not in used, cause switches give out radiations?! But after this questionaire, I realised theyre not just for our own personal health, but it helps to reduce ecological footprint on Earth too! While I was doing this calculation, I've also sent it to my friends, hopefully theyll be as shock as I am and start to make a difference too.