Angela Lam

Sunday, October 30, 2011

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.

Monday, June 20, 2011

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!!!

Monday, May 9, 2011

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.