Let It Rain, Let It Rain, Let It Rain…
When the rains come, a Crayella can keep you dry, while scoring points for sustainability. What's a Crayella? It's an eco-friendly umbrella designed by ME doctoral student Erin MacDonald and her classmates, ME alumni Tony Koenigsknecht, Marc Uphues and Njemile Vinson, for the Design For Manufacturing class taught by Professor Sridhar Kota. Professor Jan-Henrik Andersen in the School of Art and Design offered advice in the creation computer-generated images of the final design form.
It's also the product that recently took first place in the on-line Umbrella Inside Out design competition, a project of the Sustainable Style Foundation in collaboration with TreeHugger.com and International Design magazine. When the votes were tallied at the end of the competition in September, the Crayella umbrella received almost double the votes of the runner-up.
The competition focused on "Cradle to Cradle" design, which looks at current products as "future food for biological or technical systems." The competition's designers had to consider the sustainability and safety of procured materials, and, when they're no longer useful for their intended purpose, their next lives as nutrients for those systems.
"When we were designing the umbrella, our team was not thinking about Cradle-to-Cradle or sustainability," said MacDonald. "That came later. This is important because it shows how really thinking through a design is frequently the best foundation for an environmental design. That was the case here. We weren't thinking about sustainability. We were just thinking about doing the best design we could from a manufacturing and user standpoint. But we did such a great job that it was not so hard for me to design the umbrella to make the transition to the Cradle-to-Cradle concept. I starting thinking about how the logistics of upcycling would work, the material it was made of, and the color changing offering incentive for repair."
The Crayella was initially the result of as DFM assignment. "On the first day of class, Professor Kota told us we would have to pick an object to redesign," said MacDonald. "The idea to work on an umbrella was mine, and the team really liked it."
The design went through many permutations before the team was pleased with it. In all, it took a semester to design and several weeks to create the prototype. The team worked very hard on the concept during the course of the class, spending many hours discussing and perfecting the design.
"We all had perfectionist tendencies, and so the project ended up evolving much beyond the level of detail that would have been required for the class," said Koenigsknecht. One of the biggest difficulties was that none of the team was expert in CAD and had to develop those skills. "We were teaching ourselves a lot of things outside the scope of the class just to complete the prototype in a way that we wanted," said Koenigsknecht. Team members noted they also had to draw on what they had learned in other courses, like mechanics and materials to make the project come to fruition.
"One of the most impressive parts of the design was its simplicity," said Uphues. "It's fairly easy to come up with a complex solution to a problem. It's much more difficult to come up with a solution once you start removing that complexity."
Another challenge was developing the prototype. "The assignment was to first reverse engineer the umbrella and then make it better by designing it for manufacturability, assembly, and reliability," said Vinson. "When we had finally drafted the design on paper, I was very excited about the changes we were making. Between the joint linkages of the umbrella spokes to the snap fit ends, it really had become the epitome of designing for manufacturing. That was the most exciting part about it.
"The biggest difficulty in making the prototype," continued Vinson, "was ensuring that the dimensions were precise enough, so that given the limitations and parameters of the rapid prototyping machine, the prototype would actually fit together. It is one thing to draw the design out on ProE, but quite another to ensure that its precise enough with proper tolerances to be a working prototype."
"Given that the spokes, joints and snap fits were relatively small in size, those differences made the assembly process more difficult. However, even with these problems, seeing our idea take a physical form was one of the most enjoyable parts of the process," added Uphues.
As it turned out, the Crayella was a perfect entry for the competition.
"Erin and I have kept in touch following graduate school and she contacted me the day she heard of this competition," said Koenigsknecht. "I hadn't heard of this contest until Erin contacted me, and I was very surprised at how well the project that we had done two years earlier fit what they were looking for."
Even though the competition is over, there's potentially more to the story and another ME connection. ME graduate Jeffrey Schox, founder of SchoxPLC, a law firm specializing in intellectual property, has offered to draft a Provisional Patent Application for the Crayella design free of charge, enabling the team to see if it's possible to make a valid business out of this product. Schox earned a BSE (cum laude) from ME in 1994 and later returned to teach an engineering course in Intellectual Property law.
"The whole project is a great example of the power of cross-department collaboration and teamwork at the College of Engineering and School of Art and Design," said MacDonald, "and it is nice to know that we will continue to have a team effort going forward into production."
