Glove Doffing Device

Needs → Goals → Objectives (NGOs) are a framework that translates stakeholder needs into specific and measurable goals and objectives to evaluate design success. We used the NGO framework to structure our design brief, defining a "safer" doffing method through establishing constraints (shown above), which were backed by secondary research. This provided our team with shared, measurable requirements to ground our evaluations.

However, while the NGO captured physical thresholds, it failed to quantify the high-stress first responders experience during emergencies. This taught me to ensure that for future projects, psychological constraints are explicitly written into the objectives early on, allowing me to grasp bounded rationality in practice. This solidified my value going into the project that communities are, in fact, important, and taught me that solutions gain true meaning when validated by the real-world constraints of the communities using them.

Morphological (Morph) charts are tools used to generate solutions based on combining sub-functions of designs. We used Lotus Blossom and "I wish" statements to obtain our sub-functions, then recombined them with the Morph Chart. These tools were effective in the diverging phase because they forced us to design around elementary actions rather than complete mechanisms. This broke our anchoring bias toward the slicer concept and introduced the tape approach.

The exercise showed me that accessible designs often emerge from optimizing a single physical interaction rather than building complex machines. However, the chart also produced highly theoretical combinations that ignored realities like moisture and friction, leading to early failures such as the air blower prototype. I would use this method again to expand the design space, but pair it with earlier low-fidelity testing to eliminate ideas that only work on paper.

To converge on our final recommendation, we used decision matrices, tools that evaluate concepts against weighted criteria or baselines to drive convergence. We used a measurement matrix to quantify prototype performance across proxy tests, followed by a two-stage Pugh chart comparing concepts against the Hook baseline. Again, this mitigated anchoring bias through data-driven decision making.

The matrix initially hid a critical flaw. The Glove Slicer scored well numerically but introduced major risks due to its exposed blade. Recognizing this limitation, we overrode the matrix and opted for a holistic evaluation to select the tape tab, a solution better suited to the time-pressured realities of emergency response. The matrix anchored our convergence in data, but informed judgment was necessary to choose the final solution, which introduced a new lens through which I approach engineering design, shifting to pragmatism. In future projects, I will use decision matrices to structure convergence though never take them as sufficient enough to justify a final recommendation.