Visibility Gel
Keeping night swimmers safe, my next project was a measuring device.
Waterproof reflective gel for visibility at night.
Taking the brief of a measuring device, and seeing how I could apply it in interesting ways is what led me to this idea of reflective gel.
We were told to take photos of people measuring things and use this as research for our product. An idea came to me later on when seeing my friends screaming at the cold water when we went swimming together.
Although the water was cold, it was within a completely safe temperature range on this occasion; however, cold water can pose a serious risk for extreme swimmers – even more so at night. The cold water can cause muscles to contract, and if you aren’t careful, there is a real risk of not being able to move from shock.
The idea was of a gel that would start a reflective green, helping with visibility at night when in the water.
Possibly with an insulating spray over the gel after application, or some other way, the gel would change colour depending on the users body temperature.
If the temperature got to low, the gel would turn red, allowing people at shore to know whether the swimmer is in danger or not.
I remember not being so proud of this piece initially, since while I believe all the ideas are good, its very conceptual, and at this point I still hadn’t made anything I actually wanted in my life. The final “product” was really just a prototype to display what it would look like.
I 3D printed a hand to add context to the prototype, which I believe also made the prototype look more impressive. In hindsight, I should have never admitted to it being a wristband like in the drawing, and should have just pretended it was gel – but at this point I did not yet understand that there is still value in presenting a prototype to submission.
We used the following format for the initial insights into the product – this was our first introduction to analysing the customer.
We then came up with some further ideas on how the product would work, as well as a few other ideas independently that we might also want to pursue.
Part 2 – Designer Maker
Raphael Murray Browne 