Fixperts Project Footraps
Brief: To find someone with an issue/problem and with the tools of design thinking and human based design create a solution that they could manufacture themselves out of consumer available materials.
We found Matt (pictured) who since birth needed to use prosthetic feet.
He was having major issues when doing yoga in college for his acting course.
His prosthetic feet were sliding and moving when he was trying to maintain balance in different poses resulting in multiple injuries and broken prosthetics.
We started off interviewing him in his house, asking him different questions about what yoga poses posed problems, what kind of gear he wears when doing yoga and what were some of the different barriers to some potential solutions.
We tried house socks with grips and some sock mockups with different grip materials but this didn’t work because the sock would move around too much, creating the same issue but within the sock
We did a variety of body storming activities with Matt, the most successful being taking clay impressions of his feet during yoga poses which gave us depth data on where he needed the most grip.
Next we started ideating different methods of how these grips would wrap around his foot. We came up with an assortment concepts a variety of different consumer available materials. We then brought these concepts to Matt and recorded the process of him trying to put these on and using them. With this feedback we went on to solidify a working prototype.
Based off our interviews with Matt and the feedback we got with our initial concepts we decided upon a solution involving cohesive tape and silicone grips applied using a template.
The benefit of this was that it gripped his foot a lot better than the all of the other concepts and the grippy socks and we could provide the template for the wraps on a single A4 piece of paper
Prototype Results
We another body storming session with Matt, this time focusing on the process of constructing the final design. This was a key part of the deliverable so it was essential that he was able to make this himself.
The result of this was us designing an IKEA style instructions guide printed on the A4 sheet with the template.
Matt with the final delivered product
Presentation set up
Video describing the project