Group: Hillary, Lizzy, Stephanie – Week 1: Finalizing a Design
We are working with a rower whose name is Joanna. She is a para-rower at CRI with one very strong leg and she uses crutches to assist her in walking. The issue that she would like solved is getting a boat down to water easier. Depending on if she is rowing a double or a single, she has to wait for someone else to come help her bring a boat down from the small boat pavilion –> onto the dock –> and into the water. Another person gets the boat from the bow and she gets the boat from the stern. She typically holds the boat on one shoulder and hops down to the dock. This method of transporting the boat is highly inconvenient for her. She wishes to have an item that would help her balance the boat on her shoulder so that she can use both her forearm crutches and stay balanced on the journey down to the water. She also wishes she could bring a single down to the water by herself so that she doesn’t have to wait on someone else’s time to wait and help her.
We came up with three initial strategies that could be a potential solution. These ideas are also based on if there would be two people carrying the boat or just one person.
1.) The Lean (one person)
2.) Le Backpack (one person) –> see above picture
3.) Boat Sling
Some key takeaways were:
- how to get the boat balanced in the first place
- ease of use–needs to be more intuitive/easier
- consider build-ability/practicality
We decided to pursue The Lean because it resembled how most able bodied rowers carry a single down to the water. The main issue of balance would be most comprehensively solved with this option with two main stability points of the head and the shoulder.
It was initially hard for my teammates to recognize the fact that the contact point they were imagining did not exist because the boat is not hollow at the point of contact for our device. Once we got through that misconception, we decided to pursue a sling that had an adjustable strap and a buckle for security along with suction cups to stick to the surface of the boat. Here is a picture where I tried to draw the boat and where the actual contact point would be:
The strap goes underneath your armpit on the opposite site and the suction cup would be the contact point of the boat. Pictured here:
