Reflection

Reflection

After finishing this assignment I have gained more knowledge and interest in what it takes to design a disaster aid product. The experience wasn’t easy especially for the target group I was designing for. Bangladesh is a very poor country and designing something cheap and affective for that community comes as a challenge. The float pack in my opinion was a great solution to the individuals living in the monsoon affected regions of Bangladesh. Those regions are affected greatly every year experiencing large amounts of flooding and great loss to vegetation. With these areas been isolated from land and surrounded by great amounts of water there is no easy access to reach these people and the only alternative will be by boat. If these food packages can be distributed to those affected regions civilians have great convenience in picking up their aid. The afterlife will also be affective as there is a more convenient way of transporting valuables along flood affected regions.
Another issue to think about in this design would be to think of a system and how it would be run by the aid workers. For example how many bags will they distribute? Will they distribute new bags or will they take them back? A number of issues still need a bit of thought in order for this project to work properly in terms of distribution and system.

The model prototype was quite a challenge to produce, this being the first time I have ever worked with a fabric to create an appearance model. Figuring out the size and dimensions of the overall product was also a challenge as I had to calculate the volume of air needed to provide a 15 kg rice sack buoyancy in water. Those 2 aspects of the model were the most challenging.

In overall I think this assignment had turned out well if provided with a little extra time I would progress with finding an ideal system of distribution. This assignment has taught me a lot in terms of materials cost and efficiency. It has also taught me about the many devastation disasters that had occurred in the past 20 years and the dramatic affects it had on the people, learning on how to decrease that devastation toll through design is a great matter to consider.