Infinity
April 2023 - May 2023 (1.5-month), Industrial Design
Fusion360, 3D printing, CNC
Group Members: Carrot Liu, Carina Zhang, Queenie
Role: Research, Design, Prototype, Modeling, Documentation, Team Coordination
Supervised by Professor Andy Garcia

"Infinity" is a 2-month group project for the Industrial Design in Action course.
The project aims to help people that use a walking stick to pick up things on the floor safely and easily.
In this project, we went through the research, ideation, prototyping, and iterating design cycle.
- Technically, we use sketches to ideate, diverse materials for fast prototyping and ergonomy, Fusion 360 for modeling, 3D printing & CNC to produce high-fidelity prototypes.
- Conceptually, we applied design thinking — to use an iterative process to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems, and generate creative ideas that can solve the problem.
In the group, I'm responsible for leading the group discussions and brainstorms, group interviews, interview insights extraction, secondary research, sketching designs, fast prototyping, ergonomic prototyping, modeling & printing both the handles, and final documentation.
First Round of Research

The first round of research aims to find the pain point in elders' daily life.
We conducted a group interview at Yangjing Memory Cafe and interviewed 4 elders about their daily life.

We used mind map to prepared questions before the interview:
All related graphs could be found on this Miro Board
During the interview, we asked the interviewees to sketch out their daily schedules on a timeline. We found that almost all the interviewees are active caregivers to their grandchildren. They spent a significant amount of time doing chores and babysitting.


We sorted our raw information according to different topics and launched secondary research on them. We found that babysitting is the top theme for our interviewees. Also, there are a few products helping elders to avoid bending down when babysitting.
Define Problem
We decide to address the pain point of bending down motion for elders that use a walking stick. We came up with 6 How Might We question to define the problem:

1. The single-leg walking stick cannot steadily support the elderly, disabled, and injured.
2. These people struggle to bend down to pick up things on the floor.
3. People don’t want to buy multiple tools to solve the problems above.
Problem Statements:
Design


Prototypes





Modeling

