Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting award-winning projects and ideas from this year’s Core77 Design Awards 2012! For full details on the project, jury commenting and more information about the awards program, go to Core77DesignAwards.com
- Fountain of Life
- Designer: Danwei Ye, Yakun Zhang & Yu Liu
- Location: Rochester Institute of Technology
- Category: Equipment
- Award: Student Runner-Up
Fountain of Life is a water birthing assistant medical device. It is a product based on a more traditional water birthing container like a tub and has several advanced material and medical technology modifications.
How did you learn that you had been recognized by the jury?
We think the most valuable point of our design is to showing the humanity and warmth through a life-related equipment. Through viewing jury’s comments, we are glad that they could feel the character even though they aren’t the users. As industrial designers, we believe that we should always pay attention to the development of our society and people’s lives, trying to find design opportunity which accord with the changes of people’s concepts. In that way, we could design something to fill the vacancy of a new type relationship between people and the society.
What’s the latest news or development with your project?
Our design process was done by us, with the technical support by our Innovation Center and the financial support by our CIAS department funding. Now, we want to take this design to the next level, which is introducing to more audiences, getting their feedback and making the decision whether it’s really necessary to design and even product this equipment from a more marketing and investing point of view. At the same time, we will work with mechanical engineering students via the support of Innovation Center, to figure out the interior structure as well as add more details to the product. That is to say, if we can’t persuade someone to spend money on this project, we still can make a better portfolio based on it.
What is one quick anecdote about your project?
As we are designing a product for women, and unfortunately we have no female team member. It became very hard for us to define some gynecology problems. And, as students, our female classmate were not familiar with these problems. As a result, we needed to discover everything by ourselves (and of course we didn’t want to ask our parents). Every time when we asked something, people would ask ‘Why do you want to know that? You will deliver your child?’ It always takes time to clarify our idea, and after that everyone will support us.
What was an “a-ha” moment from this project?
Lots of “a-ha” moments happened in the development process of this project, and the most important one was in the beginning of ideation, one of us said: Is it comfortable to set in a hot tub in that weird position? Then, we actually tried the position by our self in a tub, and it was very hard for us. After that, we merged a chair into the tub, that made it easier to get in and push. A-ha, that is a good solution to combine chair and tub into a new medical delivery equipment. At last, we collect every thing we can create into one design and here it is.
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