Week 1 : Brainstorming

Our week one tasks were to brainstorm for potential design ideas that involved creating a mechanism which can be used by those who have commercial wheelchairs, to go up or down indoor stairs unassisted. Moreover, the mechanism should be portable, cheap to make and safe for the user.

The greatest challenge we faced was that the mechanism had to ensure that the wheelchair would maintain a tilted position for user safety and comfort when moving up or down stairs.

Our team thus set out brainstorming ideas and created an initial website design for our product.

Moreover, we created a short project proposal power-point, outlining our ideas and explaining factors such as :

• Goal of the project

• Market needs for such a product

• List of Stakeholders and their agendas

• Constraints and requirements for the product

• Products in the current market for this purpose, with their respective "pros" and "cons"

• List of patents issued in the field

• List of Engineering and Societal Standards

We then created a decision matrix to pick one of our initial design to be our proposed design.