As we age, mobility becomes a challenge. It becomes harder to maintain balance, get up and down, or bend over. Many people enjoy gardening or tending to plants. But because this activity requires getting up and down, and bending over for prolonged periods of time, elderly people may experience barriers to enjoying gardening. In this project, we focused on creating a mobility aid that could help make gardening a more accessible activity as we age.
Because our target user has much different day-to-day experiences and challenges than our own, it is important that we gather insights and knowledge from our user. To do so, we did online research and conducted multiple interviews with about 13 questions each. We wanted to know what the interviewee's gardening habits look like, what tools they use and why, and what gardening experiences they have had.
Next, we moved on to ideation. From our findings, we decided to focus on creating a product that helped not only mobility but also comfort over extended periods of time. Below are sketches my partner and I completed.
The final concept we landed on is a modular components that fit together around a garden bed to bring the user closer to the plants without them having to get up or down. The user would kneel on the step and lean on the wall which would help support them as they garden. These components have padding to help with comfort.
To determine what the branding of our project was based around, we were challenged to select three words at random for the mood board and one word for the logo. For our mood board we got: devilish, boring, and delicate. For our logo, we got tornado. I thought this was a fun and creative way to challenge ourselves because the words we got were very different from each other.
Above is our final concept rendering created in Lumion.
It was important that the height of the kneeling step would be around the height of the user's knees because then there would be minimal transfer distance between standing and kneeling.
This project was completed in collaboration with another studio member, Andre Rathje. He can be reached at andrer@iastate.edu
