The Collapsible Rake

 The Collapsible Rake

JC:Labeled Rake (2014)

    As humans grow older we become weaker in most senses. Our muscles deteriorate, our bones become more fragile, and our bodies ache more. With all of these hindrances it can make any simple task challenging or painful. To help relieve this pain and make tasks easier some products are designed around this knowledge of old age. When designers create an object to help the elderly they cannot know all of the struggles that every person has, but through empathy they can come as close as possible to understanding how to eliminate these struggle. Designers place themselves in the shoes of whomever they are designing the object for. This is empathy, looking at something from the consumer’s perspective.

    This project taught empathy through research, interviews, and experience. I read a couple articles about empathy and times when it was needed but not used (For example in the NBA with the new basketball design) and when it was first employed to benefit the elderly (Pattie Moore’s life work). I learned what people needed or wanted by going out and talking to a gardener who uses tools and had problems using certain tools. Through this interview I learned what a professional gardener needed and how he thought I could redesign certain tools to benefit him. I also had the experience (which is the most important part of empathy because knowledge comes from experience) of actually working in a garden without tools at first and then with tools. This allowed me to realize what difference tools make in everyday work, and then when I had tools we learned how they are not always designed to be the most efficient they can be. As Steve Metz, a gardener from the Lincoln Park Conservatory, said, “ ... no tool is designed perfectly for its job…” No person can create a tool that encompasses everyone’s needs. That is what the study of empathy is trying to prove, that as designers it is our responsibility to design a product as close to perfect as possible.

JC: Rake Forces (2014)

    My rake was designed with the purpose of making a versatile tool because I understood that everyone has different needs. It can collapse for easier storage because a normal rake that is 5 feet long and has a 30 inch head is a burden to store. I thought wouldn’t it be easier if it was smaller, so I designed the rake to fold in on itself. The angle that the rake head can be placed at is adjustable so that no matter what your need is you can reposition the head. The reason for this is because when you are older, bending over can be painful. But when the rake head is parallel to the ground it is most efficient, because all of the work is going into moving the leaves instead of down into the ground, so people bend over to rake. My new design of the rake makes it so that the user can set the rake head’s position so that people can decide how much they want to bend. When the rake is closer to parallel to the ground pulling is easier because most of your force is going into pulling instead of down into the ground.  It is less stress because the user does not have to lean over to try and get the rake parallel. With the normal head you have a set efficiency and stress level because there is only one way to use the rake, but this way the user can decide. The other challenge that I had when using a rake was that leaves kept jumping out of the end because the prongs bounced from the uneven ground and I thought of a way to prevent this by placing a steel bar across the prongs to create more stability. The stability means that the prongs don’t move as much so less leaves come out of its grasp. The last improvement that I implemented was to allow adjustable length because I know that not everyone is the same height, so why make a rake that only reaches one size person and everyone else has trouble using it. I decided to make it so that the length could be adjusted to insure that no matter how tall you were, that it was comfortable.  

JC: Rake Storyboard (2014)