NCA thesis display: Making lives easier through better design

Product design students focus on labourers, children with disabilities.

LAHORE:

Ammara Mumtaz’s red and green cutlery is placed in a row on a single shelf. A white wall, on which she has painted deformed hands in black paint, serves as a backdrop.

It takes a minute to realise that the cutlery is not ordinary. The pieces – a mug, a spoon, a fork, a bowl, a plate, a pizza slicer and a sandwich holder – are unique. They have been specifically designed for children with upper-limb disabilities.

The work of the four product design students, graduating from the National College of Arts this year, is displayed at the college’s product design studio.

Though the products are completely different from each other, they have a strong common element of utility. Among the products are cutlery for the disabled, a load bearing body extension, a smart kitchen and bags.

The students – Mumtaz, Hira Qazi, Amen Shoaib and Sundus Khusro – say they have been working at developing their products for six months each. All of them plan to work for at least a year before pursuing higher education.

Talking to The Express Tribune, Mumtaz said she has tried “to promote independent eating for the disabled”, especially children between seven and 19 years of age.

She says she had always wanted to design tableware. She says the idea of designing cutlery for special children struck her while she was visiting a special children’s school. The spoons and mug handles, she said, had styrofoam wrapped around them, making it harder for the children to use them.

“This is assistive tableware for children with developmental delays or disabilities who experience upper limbs problems such as lack of muscle control, slower movement, stiffness in the arms and hands, reduced grip and floppiness of the hands,” Mumtaz told The Express Tribune.

For research, she visited several special children’s schools and met other children at various hospitals. She also consulted several physiotherapists before finalising the design.

“According to doctors, such children mainly use their thumbs to hold the cutlery and eat (50 per cent of the effort is made by the thumb and the other half by all the fingers).

Therefore, I have designed each of my products with a particular focus on thumb use,” she explains.

Pointing towards the prototypes made using fibre glass, Mumtaz says that the actual products will be designed in light weight plastic and in bright colours – for colour therapy. She said it took her four months to settle on a final design. A 3x4 foot poster next to her display shows sketches of some 25 to 30 design options for each of the pieces.

She hopes her creation will help make eating time fun and painless for special children.

Next to Mumtaz’s display wall is Hira Qazi’s load bearing body extension for labourers who carry light to moderate weights.

Displayed on a mannequin, the three-kilogram fibre structure could easily be worn on the back with its buckles strapped at the front. Qazi says it was designed keeping in mind the shoulder, backbone and lower back problems labourers develop as a result of carrying loads the wrong way.

The load bearer has several racks that can be folded and unfolded according to requirement. It can also be converted into a trolley. The worker can carry up to 50 kg at a time which, Qazi says doctors told her, is the standard weight an adult can carry without developing any physical problems. She said the design was finalised after several rounds of consultation with some orthopaedists and doctors.

The load bearer is available in three sizes. Qazi is hoping some non governmental organisations will purchase her product to distribute them among labourers. She has priced it at Rs3,000 each.

Inspiration hit when she was visiting Shah Alam Market a year ago to buy some fabric for a college festival. There, she saw a labourer with a hump. Later she learnt that it was because he lifted heavy weight manually. “That was when I decided I wanted to design something for them,” she said.

Amen Shoaib’s final year project is a smart kitchen – a folding kitchen unit with a wash basin, a dish drier, two cabinets, two platforms, a stove and a two-in-one oven and microwave that can fit into a four-foot corner.

“It is smart because it can expand up to eight feet but fit in half the space,” she said.

Designed keeping studio apartments, offices and guest houses in mind, the smart kitchen’s two platforms – which can also be used as cutting boards or a counter – can be folded down and vice versa.

Each of the four sections – the two platforms, the wash basin between the drier and a cabinet and the stove between the oven and a cabinet – is two-foot wide. The unit is attached to each other with reeling.

The unit, including actual appliances, costs Rs115,000. Shoaib, who says she is looking forward to designing industrial units, hopes to meet representatives from established businesses to sell her idea.

Sundas Khusro has challenged “conventional handbag design” by designing “multi-purpose” hand bags, clutches, organisers, and drum bags in leatherite, also called artificial leather. Each bag has a unique shape and carries imprints of emblems she says have been taken from Islamic art on shrines in the Punjab. She says the three elements of design – calligraphy, geometry and floral patterns – have always inspired her.

Khusro has used black, silver and copper colours, which she says are three important families in the Islamic colour palette after green and gold.

Priced between Rs4,500 and Rs9,000, the bags come with an option of three to five inches tall fabric trays with several sockets separated with fabric covered cardboard walls.

“The owner can organise small things by placing them in separate sockets so that they do not rub against each other. For instance jewellery, portable storage devices (USBs), pens, which are otherwise likely to get damaged if put inside bags with other stuff.”

There are ‘convertible’ bags, too, which can be turned into a clutch from a hand bag “if there is a sudden plan for a dinner after work”.

Khusro hopes to give Pakistani fashion market a new label that is classy, affordable and represents Islamic art. For now, she has labelled her brand Kief – Persian for handbag. 

Published in The Express Tribune, January 23^rd, 2013.