Children safety.

I found in INDN 211 I had enjoyed making children's  toys or objects that were based around children so I felt I could look at making something round children in this task. I have an 18month old brother back at home so thought about thing that you could make his life and surroundings safer. you don't want to restrict children's lives to much as you need them to learn what not to do on their own but there needs to be limitations on how far you will let them go before they are going to corse them harm and danger.

He is a boy of routine and every night he get his little chair and pushes it into the kitchen and watches his mother make his dinner and 'helps' wash the dishes, and he enjoys leaning how his dinner is made, but the only problem with him moving his chair around the kitchen and being able to be at the hight of the bench is he is now able to touch the elements which are occasionally hot and as you are multi tasking when in the kitchen you can watch every second you are in the kitchen so there is the risk of him touching the element when it is hot. it would be good idea to design a way that he can reach the elements and restricted him on pushing his chair close enough to the element but also make it easy for the person cooking to get to the element easily. or design a way so that if he get his hands near it either it wont burn him.

Bread tags it the highest object that kids choke on, so another think I thought I could design was to create a way to keep bread fresh, easy to make, easy to seal and reseal and children won't choke on. you could have a snap-lock type of seal on the bag so that you could reseal it and would have the bread tags but then there is the fear of squashing the bread. or just go to another extreme and design a completely new way to seal brad that will be easy and will take away the bread tag.

Safety.

For my next design project was have to come up with a new product of redesign a product to make it safer. So the get inspired I looked stats.nz and ACC.nz to see if I could find some stats on the types of injuries that people face though out the home and then from that I could think of designing ways of preventing it. I found it had finding specific stats on the types of injuries recorded, it just gave numbers on the age, race and gender of the people making claims which I didn't find helpful in preventing injuries. I then decided to broaden my search and found a Scottish website that gave the list of the serous injuries in the home in 2009-2010;

This table showed that nearly three quarters of people who where hospitalised  from injuries in the home was due to falling. I then discussed these stats with an occupational therapist who focuses on the care and assisting elderly people and she said the not only is the fall rate high with in elderly but they also have the fare of falling but a lot of them are stubborn and don't want their lives to change to radically when that are getting older and frail because that shows that they are weak, so If I was to design something of elderly I would have to come up with something that assisted them or prevented them from injuries but also didn't look different or would draw attention to themselves. so will design hidden handrails or lager steps, but also has to be easy to use as well.

We talked about different ideas that could help and protect elderly;

• I know that my grandmother finds it harder now days to get in and out of our swimming pool as she cant pool her self easily up our steps as we don't have any handrails and the steps are at a step gradient. It would be cool to design a way to get her easily in and out of our pool but not change the aesthetics of our pool but putting in a rail. 

• A lot to elderly people take pride in their gardening and like to spend their days in their garden, grooming and trimming there flowers or planting vegetables. When people get older their skin gets softer and are more prone to get cuts, this is then a problem when it come to cutting their roses as they then get pricked by the thorns, so I could design something that didn't restrict them from cutting their roses but could protect their delicate skin from the thorns. Also as they are more frail they find it had to be down on their knees and also find it hard to get up from the ground so another thing I could design around the idea of gardening could be to make a vegetable garden that was safe and easy for old people to use and maintain, it could be raised higher of the ground so they didn't have to bend down, but also designed ergonomically so they can reach everything easily. 
• They also find it hard to get in and out of bed, going from the lying position to then sit up and turn and then from their to then stand up. it uses a lot of energy to just a simple task as it uses a lot of different mussels and you have to use a lot of power to pull or self up. I could design something that could make this take easer but didn't change their environment radically as they don't like things looking different so physiologically it shouldn't change their environment to much.
• Also when you get older your vision decreases it becomes harder to complete tasks and makes it harder to see your soundings as your world docent look as defined. To make it easier to see around you home when your vision is decreasing Occupational Therapist change the lighting, and light up rooms resulting in making the surroundings easier to see. I could design a device that  used light to make it easier for elderly to see where ever they go as they don't just need their homes lightened up they need everywhere they go. I could make a walker with lights on it or some kind of head torch, but I think you would just look radicals with that and would draw attention to your self in a way you don't want to be addressed.

Chocolate lamp photos

Making it.

I felt the best and easiest way to make this light was to lathe it, I first started by lathing the top dome that would be later vacuum formed that would be were the chocolate would be incased. I then lathed the body of the light, I went to a simple shape that widened halfway up and then angled back in, I felt that this was a different shape then most lights as center pieces. I also made suer the bottom of it it perfectly fitted the vacuum formed plastic.

After I made all of the forms I wanted to design the the holes where the chocolate would fall through I didn't just want a simple one hole in the center as I feel thats what a bottle it for, I wanted it to be unique and delicate so i did a few sketches;

I looked at doing circles, rings and lines as I felt that they could all give of a different look when the chocolate flowed through them. I didn't think I should do the ring one as I thought it would be to hard to execute cleanly as I would have to cut the shapes out with a craft knife and doing curved spaces are hard to pull of well so I decided to to continue with that design. I first tried the lines and cut them in to one of my vacuum formed plastic domes and tried to pour melted chocolate though them and see what happens.

I found the four lines didnt would as well as I had hoped I found three problems with it

1. I found i had made the slits to narrow so that when the chocolate was poured into it it did not exit and just sat in the bowl
2. The chocolate fall all along the lines I found the the chocolate just fell to the end of the points and then drop off which defeated the point of having them as lines
3. the last problem I had with the four lines was that I felt it looked like an udder as there was four part the chocolate could exit and I didn't poetically want it ti look like an udder it wasn't the look I was going four.

after the lines I tried the circles and I make them wider then the lines and I found that the chocolate flowed a lot easier with a bigger area.

After this I had an idea to give the user a bit of freedom and alterations so I made two more chocolate cases, one with three larger holes and the other with just one even bigger hole. having three different covers meant the user could choose what one they wanted, they could have one with six smaller holes that would take longer for the chocolate to fall though but would spread the chocolate  out further when it falls while the one big hole would melt faster but would only fall in one spot. 

I also had to think about the shape of the chocolate inside the case, I found it didn't melt all the way though when it was to thick this then meant the chocolate didn't fall though. I also didn't want it to thin then there would be enough chocolate to enjoy. the way I found to get it just right was to have it thiner where the chocolate would exit so it would melt faster and then have it thicker on the sides so due to gravity then it melted it would get heavy and fall through. 

Chocolate

when talking it over with my tutor we decided that my wax light wasn't strong enough as there wasn't much to it so after a long time of thinking we came up the the brilliant idea of making the light no longer out of wax but out of chocolate instead, to make it a center piece for a dinner table so the when the light is on it results in the chocolate to melt.

I thought of different ways I could deign it

• the first was to make the chocolate around the light, on top of it so when the heat would rise from the light it would make the chocolate melt and collapse around the lamp, reveling the light and making a fondu around it. the problem I had with the form would be that I didn't think it would be the best move to have the chocolate fall onto the light as there could be some health risk with halogen lights mixing with food i also didn't want chocolate to get into the wiring as it seemed like a mess to clean up.
• another Idea I had was to have the chocolate like a candle and have the light on the flexible wire and have it going up the center of the light resulting in the chocolate to represent a candle and when the chcoclate melts it would make a melted puddle around the base of the candle.
• another Idea I had was the have a ring of halogen light that the chocolate would melt through, this way the light wouldn't be covered and would be shining the whole time and won't be effected by the chocolate but would still make the chocolate melt through the center.
• the last Idea I had was to have the chocolate and lighting fixture hanging up above the users dinner table with the chocolate below the light incasing the light, and below on the table would be a bowl of the food that the user wants to have covered in chocolate, such as fruit nuts or crackers. when the light heats up the chocolate it will make it drip down and slowly revel the light with in it.

Development.

After doing the testing I thought about different ways I could make the form work, I tried to push the Idea of having the wax fall into water but I found it hard to pick a shape as I needed the wax form to be an angular shape pointing down so the wax would fall down when it melted but i couldn't figure out a shape of the water to complement it. I also found it hard to figure out how to hide the wiring from the battery to the lights as the wax would be sitting on it and I don't want it to be visible. I finally came up with an idea when I found a lighting design online that I liked I thought it was simple but I liked the contrast between the to materials, so I was going to redesign this look but make it out of wax rather then a bulb so that when it melted it would show the contrast between the wood and wax thou not just the colour and the transparency of the wax but also would show how the wax melts in the light and the wood wont, it would also make a interesting shape around the wood as it melts down, it will go form two balls to one.

Halogen

I felt the next step to do was to buy some halogen lights and play around with them and find out their limitations, I went to a Lighting shop and asked them about halogen lights and want was the easiest to work with so they found me some 10watt bulbs, having 10 watts went that I could set them up to s simple circuit and use normal batteries rater then buying but battery packs.

i was also given sockets to put the bulbs into so that so it didn't have to play around trying to solder the lights to wire and it also had hooks on it so I could easily attach it to my frame. I also found away to get around soldering because in the last project I found it very difficult to solder so this time to save time and my sanity I would a way to screw the wires in to place rather then solder them.

 I found a place in wellington to buy big blocks of wax that I could melt down and remold in to my chosen shape.

I then made a simple circuit to see it I could get the light to work, and I DID. 

The next part was the most important part of my testing, to see if the light could get hot enough to melt the wax, so I set it up so the wax was siting on top of the light so that when the heat off the light would rise up and corse the wax to heat up and melt. and it worked... very slowly, but it worked. i feel a few there where a few factors on why it melted slowly one would have been the fact that it was only a 10watt light and if i had a stronger one it would melt faster and another factor would of been because it was in an open space so the heat was not controlled so it went out the sides so it i made it a closed space it would trap the heat resulting it to melt faster.