REFLECTION – VISUALIZATION

Challenge

I’m a mechanical engineering student and in my junior year our  group had to come up with product that was eco-friendly and  cheap enough to replace an already available product in the  market. Since we were all students then and didn’t have enough  pocket money to do anything high tech, we sticked to simple  everyday things that we could change such as a ‘raincoat’.

Since our country was a monsoon country it was the perfect thing  to produce with all the above criteria. And so we did!

Application

We sat down as a group and thought of all ways we could make a  raincoat more eco-friendly and cheap. We thought all the things a  raincoat should be.

 Compact and easy to carry around after its use   Waterproof all around the body   Easy to remove and get into

And it should be made eco-friendly

We needed a material that was easy to procure, cheap to  manufacture with and recyclable. I asked each of my group  members to keep all the above needs in mind and visualize a  material that fill all the above needs. I told them to visualize  their daily ride back home and remember all the things they see  that could be used as raw material for this project.

And after many hits and misses we finally selected the raw  material we needed- Poly Vinyl Chloride or PVC. It was readily  available all around us in the form of advertise boards and they  were usually discarded after use. They would probably end up in  junkyard and we could stockpile a lot of them if we wanted.

And just like we got hold of some advertisement boards,  removed the PVC Sheets from them and stitched them into a  prototype raincoat. We had to submit this prototype for an  upcoming exhibition along with other groups as a project of ours.

It was a huge success with all our professors impressed with the  idea and how simple though good it was. Thanks to Visualizing  we were able find this simple and innovative replacement to a  normal raincoat.

INSIGHT AND APPROACH

What I found helpful with the visualization tool was that as a  group it was easy for us to come up with a raw material for our  project because each of us visualized the needs for our project  and thought of a solution for it with our everyday trip home.

Just by visualizing that trip home we were easily able to find a  raw material source- the advertisement boards as a solution to  our problem and easily make an eco friendly and cheap raincoat.

