To create an accessible lunchbox that any person with a disability can use, may that person be blind or doesn’t have a functional arm, etc.
This project also embodies the ethos of socially responsible design, because we are creating this design by keeping in mind that there aren’t any solutions created for those people who are disabled, we are creating a lunchbox that will help people with disabilities carry and open the lunchbox and eat from it, without getting anyone’s help. Since people with disabilities are always treated differently than those who don’t have any disabilities, for example, some people cheer them for doing normal tasks like driving to work or doing some work, etc. They feel bad in their mind for doing a normal task, but being treated differently than others.
The prototype and the design plan also stimulate critical thinking, because our group had several discussions online on discord and we also had some meetings in which we discussed how will the product be designed, who will it help, how can we create it, and what other features can we add to make the accessible lunchbox even better to use. We also researched multiple materials and many different ways of production, and in the end, we found some of the best materials that we could use and we also found a way to make the product cheap and affordable.
We started visualizing the design and we first came up with a really simple design, when pushed the lid would slip off of the top and rest on the side, but it wasn’t that accessible and it looked like this:
The group brainstormed and came up with new ideas that helped solve other problems that could potentially occur while using the lunchbox. The process of forming the final design went like this:
First of all, we couldn’t decide what we needed to add to the project, for example, whether should we add brail or not, what material should we use for the box, and how to create that material (because there were two ways to create it), etc. So for the brail, we found some information on the internet that said that only one in ten blind people knew how to read brail.
We then thought of many different things possible with materials, but finally, we changed them from our initially selected materials, cause we weren’t going to use wood or plastic so we ideated and changed to stainless steel and rubber, then we were in a dilemma that how would we join the rubber on the steel, and because there were two options and both had their own benefits, we selected the one with epoxy (the other one was to use a chemical process to rubberize the whole steel part, which would probably have not been that good in the long term (which we didn’t know before), so we just chose the epoxy to join them).
When we displayed our product on the show and tell presentation, people really liked it, they also understood the reason we were making this product. They understood that people with disabilities feel bad when we appreciate them doing normal tasks, and they just want to feel normal, and that’s why we are making this product, so they can eat their lunch from the lunchbox without any difficulty and without anyone’s help. If the group agreed, we were planning to make a live prototype of the design and try to pitch it to a company that would have helped in creation and distribution of the accessible lunchbox.
