Canary Safety

Designing for safety in commercial construction areas

A product development project sponsored by Mine Safety Appliances Company (MSA)

A utility patent application has been filed.

Falls are the leading cause of death in the construction industry, which itself accounts for the largest number of occupational deaths. Working on a project sponsored by Mine Safety Appliances, our interdisciplinary team of designers, researchers and engineers sought a solution to an area that has seen little innovation. The result was a completely new kind of shuttle that allows workers to bypass each other on a horizontal lifeline, streamlining a time-consuming and potentially dangerous process.

Phase 1: Identify

In the first phase of the project, we were given the task of finding opportunities for a safer environment for commercial construction. After brainstorming, opportunity evaluation, stakeholder analysis, site visiting, we found that fall protection offered the greatest opportunity to create positive change.

Phase 2: Understand

From our further research, there were strong points about how pressures to finish jobs faster creates increased chaos and a constantly changing environment that presents many risks for its workers. It’s necessary to have a product that allows workers to navigate this environment quickly, safely and uninhibited. Thus, we have redefined the POG as it follows: There is an opportunity for products that enable safe and efficient movement at elevated heights.

Phase 3: Conceptualize

Our team conceptualized product ideas in cycles of generation and evaluation. Similar to our approach to finding a product opportunity gap, we started by generating tons of concepts, focusing on quantity and variance in our ideas and using constraints as a jumping point for more concepts. Every one of our ideas was visualized in sketch form, making it tangible and allowing us to evaluate it equally. Out of tons of concepts our group was able to evaluate, categorize, and pair down to three major ideas.

Phase 4: Realize

Two Solutions:

The value that is being added by these solutions includes:

Prototypes:

Stress Analysis:

A basic stress analysis helped us to evaluate a shuttle design that would be stamped from a single plate of steel. Our final design increased radii, was bulked up and called for hot forging.

Market:

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