Redesigning the traditional Chinese shoulder pole
peiwuyang.com
peiwuyang.com
Working as a designer at social enterprise dedicated to water purification in India clued me into one particular case of this over engineering. A well-known design firm did a month-long visit at my company to design a new carrying method for the water cans that people used to transport filtered water back to their homes or businesses. They did many of these same "studies" and prototypes and came up with this plastic clip to hook a 20 liter jerry can to the side of a bike or motorcycle. They distributed them to customers, took some pictures and left. Within a month most were lost, broken, or found too difficult to use. In the end what was the solution that people ended up using? A simple piece of sheet metal bent into an s-curve and hooked over the sides of the bike frame. Cheap, simple, and easy to manufacture. It was designed and made by a customer of the company, by himself. You don't need a college education and a design background to come up with the correct solution; most people know what they need, and they will go out and make it happen. These shoulder poles are a perfect example of Jugaad solutions, an innovative fix or work-around. It might just not be as sexy as one you'll find in a design studio or classroom.
This op-ed from NY Times about a $300 house design contest from a few years back does a similar job articulating the point, too. It's worth a read: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01srivastava.html
It is very easy to open when you want, never opens when you don't want, and there are no pieces to lose.
http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/...
A typical designer will view functionality/usability as the ultimate goal, which often fails in practice because they ignored the other 50% - the emotional, sometimes irrational, side of value perception in products.
This is critically important in industrial design.
For example two emotional things stand out in your story:
a) the metal version seems tougher than plastic, appearing to be stronger aesthetically, even if it doesn't do a better job for the use-case
b) a local person made it, creating a local emotional connection to the products
They're targeting the extremely poor demographic and any design that requires complicated construction would be impossible to build.
The prototypes shown are far from achieving cost effectiveness it seems.
So they've been using this pole for 1,000 years. Yet I see it for 1 minute and I want to improve it.
Why? What makes me different from them? Why did they not try to improve it themself? What am I missing?
Steps for making a curved wooden yoke
1. Cut down a tree
2. Saw out a rectangular cross-section
3. Cut out rough outline of the curved pole
4. Whittle it down to the appropriate thickness
5. Sand down to smooth it out and reduce the possibility of splinters
End result: A single curved yoke and a lot of small pieces of wood that you can't do much else with. You could make more yokes with the rest of the tree, but each time you make one you will essentially waste the cutout section.
Steps for making a Bamboo carrying pole
1. Cut down a piece of bamboo
2. Cut a piece of the appropriate length
3. Split it down the middle
End result: Two carrying poles. The rest of the bamboo can then be cut to make even more carrying poles with practically zero waste.
So you see that the manufacturing processes are very different. The bamboo carrying pole can be made using just a machete with minimal skill or effort. For the wooden yoke you will need an ax to cut down the tree and various woodworking tools to shape the yoke. It also takes more time and care to carve the wood appropriately.
Another consideration is that trees take a relatively long time to grow, whereas bamboo is the fastest growing plant on earth.
Why split it, rather than just using the entire tubular pole? No doubt I'm overlooking an important feature. This is just for my curiosity.
> What makes me different from them?
You probably don't have the experience of use that comes with 1000 years. Or even one summer.
As I see it, the tool is already adequate. Especially in bamboo form, the pole has some flex and a smooth surface. Adding curved wood or fabric would cause additional rubbing wear. In the case of curved wood (and some of the prototypes), you lose versatility in how you can use it.
When these guys go up and down narrow stairs, they follow each other closely, each leading with one basket higher and in front. The designs that lock into the torso would make navigating steps and quick direction changes harder.
Imagine there was no plastic, no composite wood. You had to find a large piece of wood to do even a small design. Plus, if there was really a needs for alternatives, there was Chinese weelbarrow [0].
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarr...
What makes you think they haven't tried to improve it in a thousand years? Or that every other person that makes their own pole doesn't have some little tweak to improve it only for themselves?
> What am I missing?
I don't mean to be rude by saying this, but: humility?
Example: http://www.objectlessons.org/work-and-innovation-victorians/...
The difference is the availability of wood. You would need a truly epic bamboo bole to make anything like that, but one ordinary plank would suffice over here.
A) There is a hidden advantage of some sort to the current design that the designers in OP are not aware of or not taking account of. It could just be cost as another poster suggested, or something else.
B) No good reason at all, just tradition. I can't find it now, but there was a post on HN asking why we still used the traditional Western wheelbarrow in our countries, when the Chinese wheelbarrow (what a coincidence!) was so obviously superior. The Chinese wheelbarrow has the wheel in the middle, so the wheel bares the load and the human just needs to push/steer.
Or perhaps there are other reasons why the simple solution is preferred. I honestly don't know. What I wouldn't do is infer that they're all stupid because they've not thought to do what is obvious to you.
1. Quick to make from local, natural, sustainable, free materials. You just split half a piece of bamboo (fast growing, flexible, everywhere in southern China/South/Southeast Asia). Can be replaced almost in-situ if broken, stolen, destroyed by local police/mafia, etc.
2. Easy to balance. The most traditional use of these sorts of poles is for bringing large loads of produce through paddy fields. In order to do so, one must frequently balance on thin muddy paths and cross streams. This is in addition to the steep and rocky terrains mentioned.
3. Easy to unload (drop the pole), without losing or upsetting your load. Thus, deniable in places where traditional street vendors are currently being pushed out by local police. (See also #1)
4. Cool and stays out of the way. Does not impede airflow to body or movement of head which may need to wear a large-brim hat. Critically important in hot and/or wet terrain, and steep terrain.
5. Can spin on the shoulder. Forward-backward orientation for thin paths (through people, planted or natural vegetation, traffic, thick foliage, rocks) or left-right orientation for lower shoulder load where feasible.
6. Skilled operators can rapidly and easily switch supporting position from the left to right shoulder very easily even under heavy load. This facilitates rest for part of the shoulder which largely offsets the alleged discomfort under high load and prolonged use.
7. To place or pick up light to medium loads (eg. mobile food preparation equipment that may include hot coals, boiling water, or similar ... relatively commonly seen in parts of Vietnam), it is sometimes useful to bend rather than fix your back in order to ensure a shock-free placement, at which point the proposed body-mounted supports become restraining.
I would also point out backpacks or harnesses of the type proposed do already exist but are usually used in different situations, ie. to carry heavier loads closer to the back up mountainous terrain where balance and wide, vegetation/rock-free paths cannot be guaranteed. Examples at http://www.tinyadventurestours.com/images/Rural/RuralYunnan4... and http://runawayjuno.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Shaping_Mo... and http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090524-Yi%20Carrying20L...
1.) If the weight gets misplaced, a simple straight bar can be rolled back up to a more "comfortable" position. A curved (C shaped) bar under load finds an equillibrium point and you can't really move it out of that point without deloading.
2.) You can take a really wide hand stance for extra balance if needed. Really nice if the weight is uneven.
3.) Damage control. There are much worse things than bruising across the shoulders. The posture of walking with a pole across your back is really not very bad provided you have adequate core strength. A few of their solutions look like they could cause bad back problems over the long term.
The pole needs to be able to move back and forth to accommodate different fulcrum points with relationship to differing weights.
See video at 1:20 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWAO3ZhD8_Q
Plus, the flat dual pole method allows for some spring in the pole so that it doesn't weigh down the carrier with each step.
I'm glad that this was posted by OP. We need to be able to discuss design failures like this, instead of just down voting them.
I think all this could have been avoided if the design firm had been forced to use a pole for all their carrying needs for a week, or even a month, out in the field. The first two things that they would have discovered is the beauty of moving the fulcrum point and the fact that it's nice for a pole to have some bounce to it.
Additionally, the pictures of them trying on the poles, in their corporate meeting rooms, gave me the absolute creeps, smacking of entitled ignorance, to both the problem and the solution.
God I hope we aren't backlashing and heading back to an age of internationalism with regards to design, just because we became such relativists in post modernism that we thought that no single solution could be better than another.
Arrgh.
Mass produced plastic support seems to fill that role. You could even join a shoulder rest part to allow switching orientation!
Its most important feature is that you're able to pivot the pole about the body, bringing the pole in front of you, and letting you fit into tighter spaces. Or, you can pivot the other direction, and spread more load across your shoulders. By spreading the weight apart, you're able to keep your balance extremely well.
Since they're focused on avoiding strain, they should be looking at ways of distributing more of the load across the lower torso and hips. One of their mockups looks like they're trying to do this, but the result looks like you give up a lot of flexibility.
A huge advantage of shoulder poles is that they can be carryed across one shoulder through narrower corridors, and only the second prototype seems to account for this. The first prototype does showan example of one-shoulder use, but it's clearly not meant for it (and looks a little bit like football shoulder pads worn the wrong way)
Um. Did somebody misplace a decimal point?
In english we have single words for, 100, 1000, 1000000, 1000000000.
Indians have a word for 1000000. The commas just serve to make a numbers more readable, thus in chinese there are 4 digits between the commas.
It is hard to argue that one system is better than another, but English has the nice property that 2^10 ~= thousand, 2^20 ~= million, 2^30 ~= billion, 2^40 ~= trillion. So i'd argue that English is superior in this respect. Chinese Big-to-Small for dates and many other things is vastly superior to English. Chinese date format is 2015-02-15, and address format is Country, Region, City,Street, number.
They have the following primary designators:
一 One 十 Ten 百 Hundred 千 Thousand 万 Ten Thousand 億 Hundred Million 兆 One Trillion
Given the following when considering the max allowed value of a specifier:
10002000 - 1000万2000千
The next significant digit:
100020003000 - 1000億2000万3000千
Next:
1000200030004000 - 1000兆2000億3000万4000千
Everything cleanly breaks down into larger sets of 4 digits.
That being said, I could easily imagine some charity that either sells these designs at an extremely (or free) discounted rate to these workers in an effort to relieve back pain and the myriad of other physiological issues the traditional pole yields.
The point of this isn't necessarily to solve pole design it is to explore designing for a specific problem generatively with some domain experts.
This kind of practice can be applied to any given domain or problem and is extremely effective at bringing a team together to build an unify product vision.
But it seems like to problem isn't well defined. There are a lot of problems that shoulder poles solve. "Moving stuff cheaply under human power" captures a lot of it, but I think that the designers might have defined them selves in to a corner by saying that they want to make a monotonically superior tool. Pick one problem and solve just that one problem in a better way. Maybe that's the lesson though. The shoulder pole is a really awesome piece of tech.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Advance-Fitness-Inc-4662-Manta/dp/B001...