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Experience Enrichment

A gardening trowel is a hand tool used for breaking soils, digging holes for planting seeds and removing weeding, and moving plants, or smoothing the ground.
But I have done researches about the hand position in using a gardening trowel, it appears that if a person is to consistently doing the same motion with the trowel, it gives the user a muscle plain due to the overuse energy of the wrist, because the way to use a gardening trowel is to lean hand position down to point the gardening trowel towards the ground, and use the energy from the wrist to dig into the soil, then it requires energy from the wrist to lift the hand up to get the soil, the amount of energy depends on the hardness of the soil. Therefore if a person is to dig in a hard soil, it can cause serious damage to the wrist.
So, to overcome the problem, we simply need to apply some basic physics motion rule, using the first class lever, placing a pivot point (Fulcrum) at the middle, then apply the load on one side, and the effort (force) on the other.

Therefore, the new design of the trowel has an effort arm of 175mm, and resistance arm of 118mm. So according to the general formula, the trowel can reduce 36% of energy used when digging.
The material used is eco-friendly, it uses recycled plastics Polypropylene (PP), it has a recycling number 5. These kind of plastics are usually used for food containers and dish washers, it had the property of hardness, which is suitable for a trowel.
This is the new design for a garden trowel.

Task 6d: Objectified

The featured film “Objectified” explains to us what we do everyday. We make assumption of everything by the first impression we see things without us even realizing we are, such as how heavy it is, how strong it is, it is what we expect the object to be. The video shows us the reason of designs by designers considering how the product is made from its raw materials, and how it connects with the user.

The word mass production gives people an impression of poor quality designs, or even no design at all, mass production might just be for the profit of a company. But in fact everything is being designed, without design, products would not even have its original shape, there are no objects that are not being designed, there is only good design and bad design. In fact, good designs should look as simple as it should be, keeping a design simple doesn’t mean there is no design to it, it takes a lot of work to keep product design as simple as it can be, products should be designed as simple as possible without unnecessary parts to confuse the user, therefore it can be mass produced. For example, the Apple Company emphasises the importance of simple, the design of apple products are simple which gives a clean feeling and it’s a pleasure for users to use.

Consumers do not realize there are always connections between products and themselves, which is what the designers are intended to do, to design products that people use it all the time but without realizing it, this is the interaction between human and products.

Hella Jongerius made a point that products should be unique. Instead of repeating the products over and over again, consumers will buy the products without really needing the product, which I agree in a commercial point of view, but if consumers are purchasing new things that are not necessary to them, it just means more pollution to the environment.

However, the main message I get from this video is the same as my belief, which is to keep things simple, sometimes people try hard to design some fancy cool stuffs, and try to be smart and design something ridicules. Someone taught me about the “KISS rule” before, which I still follow even now, which is “Keep it simple, stupid!” because the simpler things are, the less mistake people gets.