ABSTRACT
COVID-19 is a highly contagious respiratory disease and is declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). COVID-19 has disrupted global supply chains including those of medical products and created severe shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE). To ease the situation, many universities, industries, maker communities, and hobbyists have come forward and shared their designs in the public domain, to enable manufacturing of PPE such as face shields with readily available materials in partnership with local industries. Face shield protects the facial region including the mucous membranes (eyes, nose, and mouth) from splashes of body fluids that could contain harmful pathogens, in this case the novel coronavirus. The design and manufacturing of two novel reusable, low-cost, lightweight, comfortable, and easy to wear face shields are presented in the current article. The headband in one face shield (referred as FS1) is realized via additive manufacturing (popularly known as 3D printing) and the other (denoted by FS2), using conventional milling operation. The novelty in FS1 is its headband, which is designed to cover the ears too while in FS2, the headband is made of 3-ply corrugated cardboard that is biodegradable and recyclable. A 175 microns thick, high transparency, scratch-resistant, and anti-fog sheet are used as the shield material. Mass-producing face shields at low costs (INR 20 or USD 0.27) with the selected manufacturing methods are proposed. Both products received very good feedback from frontline workers. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
Since the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic outbreak, and the requirement to 'stay at home' and 'work from home', we, as a collaborative species have been forced to find ways of computer-supported collaboration. Going beyond global design and distributed design. We now find ourselves as a human race, not with a desire to collaborate using computers, or with a requirement, but it is now a necessity. In many ways, a paradigm shift has occurred. This research investigates the use of novel technology to support student teams in the conceptual design phase of an engineering design project. A review of published literature identified a lack of understanding in the impact that a digital distributed environment can have on the outcomes of a collaborative ideation task. The literature suggested there would be little to no change between working in a collocated and digital distributed environment. An experiment was designed that asked 16 participants working in pairs to complete an ideation task in both a synchronous traditional collocated environment and a synchronous digital distributed environment. The results from the experiment suggest that conducting the ideation task within a digital environment has a negative effect on the outcomes of the ideation task. © Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education: Disrupt, Innovate, Regenerate and Transform, E and PDE 2022. All rights reserved.