Deaf Cyclist Safety

Deaf Cyclists RFP:

In Praxis II, my main project was developing a safety device for deaf cyclists in downtown Toronto. It identified three different sounds, and displayed the sound and direction on a helmet mounted mirror. 

While providing this solution, I had to go through the process of reframing and revising the requirements for the project. This was very important in creating the appropriate design space for my group, and focusing our design into the true problem. This shows how I follow steps 1, 2, and 6 of my engineering design process. 

Reframing involved prioritizing, pushing back on, modifying and adding new requirements. Below is a summary of the changes we made to our original RFP requirements. The chart below is from the original RPF. Green checks are the requirements we kept as is, and red X's are places we pushed back. A prioritized list that we came up with is shown below the chart. 

Another large aspect of this project was prototyping. Prototyping is when you start to combine ideas together, which often leads to readjusting the requirements of the project. Prototyping can often show aspects of the design that you might not have considered, and shows if the general idea is feasible. For example, in our helmet-mounted LED display (pictured below), we realised as soon as we prototyped that the brightness of the LED lights was an important factor.

A design decision that our prototype shows very well is that helmet mounted direction signals are intuitive to use. When you turn your head, the display turns with you, so the direction reference point always makes sense. This same concept applied with the mirror - if you want to see something, just turn your head, not your whole bike.