
Redesigning the traditional Chinese shoulder pole - xwowsersx
http://www.peiwuyang.com/shoulder-pole-design-research
======
dylanbox
I always have a problem with social design challenges like this. Outsiders
always have some notion that they're more capable of coming up with solutions
for these "problems" than the people who actively live with them. It typically
ends up being over-engineered or flawed due to ignoring some cultural reasons
for the status quo.

Working as a designer at social enterprise dedicated to water purification in
India clued me into one particular case of this over engineering. A well-known
design firm did a month-long visit at my company to design a new carrying
method for the water cans that people used to transport filtered water back to
their homes or businesses. They did many of these same "studies" and
prototypes and came up with this plastic clip to hook a 20 liter jerry can to
the side of a bike or motorcycle. They distributed them to customers, took
some pictures and left. Within a month most were lost, broken, or found too
difficult to use. In the end what was the solution that people ended up using?
A simple piece of sheet metal bent into an s-curve and hooked over the sides
of the bike frame. Cheap, simple, and easy to manufacture. It was designed and
made by a customer of the company, by himself. You don't need a college
education and a design background to come up with the correct solution; most
people know what they need, and they will go out and make it happen. These
shoulder poles are a perfect example of Jugaad solutions, an innovative fix or
work-around. It might just not be as sexy as one you'll find in a design
studio or classroom.

This op-ed from NY Times about a $300 house design contest from a few years
back does a similar job articulating the point, too. It's worth a read:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01srivastava.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/opinion/01srivastava.html)

~~~
bobbles
Sounds like the designers that decided that on a tv remote the clip that holds
the battery door in place needs to be the flimsiest thinnest piece of plastic
imagineable.

~~~
eCa
This[1] is the best battery door design I've seen on a tv remote.

[1]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwGvuQFaDE4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwGvuQFaDE4)

~~~
Sophistifunk
How on earth is something as simple as battery replacement yet requires a
video tutorial and specific "don't touch the sides" warnings even remotely
well-designed?

~~~
eCa
Agreed, the video makes it overly complicated.

It is very easy to open when you want, never opens when you don't want, _and_
there are no pieces to lose.

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kookiekrak
These designs seem to be missing a big factor which is the cost and effort
necessary to build one of these shoulder poles.

They're targeting the extremely poor demographic and any design that requires
complicated construction would be impossible to build.

~~~
ars
Carving some curved wood to enlarge the contact area doesn't seem like it
would be that hard or expensive. Or even a bit of leather, cloth or rope.

So they've been using this pole for 1,000 years. Yet I see it for 1 minute and
I want to improve it.

Why? What makes me different from them? Why did they not try to improve it
themself? What am I missing?

~~~
zhemao
You are seriously underestimating the differences in labor and material costs.

Steps for making a curved wooden yoke

1\. Cut down a tree

2\. Saw out a rectangular cross-section

3\. Cut out rough outline of the curved pole

4\. Whittle it down to the appropriate thickness

5\. Sand down to smooth it out and reduce the possibility of splinters

End result: A single curved yoke and a lot of small pieces of wood that you
can't do much else with. You could make more yokes with the rest of the tree,
but each time you make one you will essentially waste the cutout section.

Steps for making a Bamboo carrying pole

1\. Cut down a piece of bamboo

2\. Cut a piece of the appropriate length

3\. Split it down the middle

End result: Two carrying poles. The rest of the bamboo can then be cut to make
even more carrying poles with practically zero waste.

So you see that the manufacturing processes are very different. The bamboo
carrying pole can be made using just a machete with minimal skill or effort.
For the wooden yoke you will need an ax to cut down the tree and various
woodworking tools to shape the yoke. It also takes more time and care to carve
the wood appropriately.

Another consideration is that trees take a relatively long time to grow,
whereas bamboo is the fastest growing plant on earth.

~~~
analog31
>>> 3\. Split it down the middle

Why split it, rather than just using the entire tubular pole? No doubt I'm
overlooking an important feature. This is just for my curiosity.

~~~
zhemao
It allows you to flatten the bamboo out so that the weight is more
distributed. Look at the pictures in the article under "Field Observation".
There are simpler varieties that aren't flattened, but if you look at the poor
bloke in "Problems in Current Situation", they seem to give you a massive
bruise on your back.

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ChuckFrank
This is terrible.

The pole needs to be able to move back and forth to accommodate different
fulcrum points with relationship to differing weights.

See video at 1:20 mark.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWAO3ZhD8_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWAO3ZhD8_Q)

Plus, the flat dual pole method allows for some spring in the pole so that it
doesn't weigh down the carrier with each step.

I'm glad that this was posted by OP. We need to be able to discuss design
failures like this, instead of just down voting them.

I think all this could have been avoided if the design firm had been forced to
use a pole for all their carrying needs for a week, or even a month, out in
the field. The first two things that they would have discovered is the beauty
of moving the fulcrum point and the fact that it's nice for a pole to have
some bounce to it.

Additionally, the pictures of them trying on the poles, in their corporate
meeting rooms, gave me the absolute creeps, smacking of entitled ignorance, to
both the problem and the solution.

God I hope we aren't backlashing and heading back to an age of
internationalism with regards to design, just because we became such
relativists in post modernism that we thought that no single solution could be
better than another.

Arrgh.

~~~
ChuckFrank
jdonaldson mentions the pivot as well. Yes, the current pole allows the user
to pivot to be parallel and perpendicular to their pole.

~~~
ChuckFrank
mmilano mentions benefits of non-fixed fulcrum as well.

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sqrt17
Germany in the 1700s/1800s had similar shoulder poles for carrying water:
[http://static3.akpool.de/images/cards/65/655879.jpg](http://static3.akpool.de/images/cards/65/655879.jpg)
They added a thicker, slightly regressed bit in the middle to avoid the some
of the pressure on the shoulder/neck area.

~~~
pnathan
If I understand wood well enough, that particular pole would have been carved
out of a plank though, yea?

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peteretep
They should look at what people squat with. Consider this piece of plastic:

[http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/betteru50.htm](http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/betteru50.htm)

~~~
darkmighty
Yea I think the key here would be looking at technologies both extremely cheap
and currently unavailable to villagers (otherwise they would probably have
thought of it).

Mass produced plastic support seems to fill that role. You could even join a
shoulder rest part to allow switching orientation!

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jdonaldson
There's more efficient ways of carrying heavy loads, but the shoulder pole is
remarkably efficient in a number of other ways.

Its most important feature is that you're able to pivot the pole about the
body, bringing the pole in front of you, and letting you fit into tighter
spaces. Or, you can pivot the other direction, and spread more load across
your shoulders. By spreading the weight apart, you're able to keep your
balance extremely well.

Since they're focused on avoiding strain, they should be looking at ways of
distributing more of the load across the lower torso and hips. One of their
mockups looks like they're trying to do this, but the result looks like you
give up a lot of flexibility.

~~~
ChuckFrank
Yes, the pivot as well.

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hwz
What are the thoughts behind redesigning the pole itself, rather than
designing a shoulder pad/attachment to better distribute the weight? It seems
like an attachment would be better able to be reused with the poles they
currently have, cheaper to create/transport, and allow for better one-shoulder
usage.

A huge advantage of shoulder poles is that they can be carryed across one
shoulder through narrower corridors, and only the second prototype seems to
account for this. The first prototype does showan example of one-shoulder use,
but it's clearly not meant for it (and looks a little bit like football
shoulder pads worn the wrong way)

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titanomachy
> ... which means that 4.7 billion people in China have only less than 2
> dollars per day to subsist.

Um. Did somebody misplace a decimal point?

~~~
b6
To expand on what solox3 said, Chinese people put commas in numbers after
every 4 digits instead of every 3. I find it kind of confusing when I need to
say 3 ten-thousands, instead of 30 thousands. It looks like that kind of
mistake to me.

~~~
protomyth
I thought 4 was not a good number, why after every 4?

~~~
jcampbell1
Chinese has single words for 100, 1000, 10000, 100000000.

In english we have single words for, 100, 1000, 1000000, 1000000000.

Indians have a word for 1000000. The commas just serve to make a numbers more
readable, thus in chinese there are 4 digits between the commas.

It is hard to argue that one system is better than another, but English has
the nice property that 2^10 ~= thousand, 2^20 ~= million, 2^30 ~= billion,
2^40 ~= trillion. So i'd argue that English is superior in this respect.
Chinese Big-to-Small for dates and many other things is vastly superior to
English. Chinese date format is 2015-02-15, and address format is Country,
Region, City,Street, number.

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simonsayscode
I don't think that this is meant to be sold to the poor demographic. I would
rather think that this is just applying design principles and the design
sprint as an exercise to an untouched piece of technology.

That being said, I could easily imagine some charity that either sells these
designs at an extremely (or free) discounted rate to these workers in an
effort to relieve back pain and the myriad of other physiological issues the
traditional pole yields.

~~~
bullfightonmars
Exactly! This is an exercise in design research. Well composed, well
documented, and well presented.

The point of this isn't necessarily to solve pole design it is to explore
designing for a specific problem generatively with some domain experts.

This kind of practice can be applied to any given domain or problem and is
extremely effective at bringing a team together to build an unify product
vision.

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tdaltonc
You could modify a Manta Ray[0] to accommodate the over-one-shoulder position.

But it seems like to problem isn't well defined. There are a lot of problems
that shoulder poles solve. "Moving stuff cheaply under human power" captures a
lot of it, but I think that the designers might have defined them selves in to
a corner by saying that they want to make a monotonically superior tool. Pick
one problem and solve just that one problem in a better way. Maybe that's the
lesson though. The shoulder pole is a really awesome piece of tech.

[0] [http://www.amazon.com/Advance-Fitness-
Inc-4662-Manta/dp/B001...](http://www.amazon.com/Advance-Fitness-
Inc-4662-Manta/dp/B0017DGBY8)

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mmilano
Would the fixed fulcrum handle un-even loads the same way? I understand you
can distribute weight on each side but seems like it would be more difficult
to load vs a non-fixed fulcrum.

~~~
westiseast
I think the user typically balances uneven loads with their hand slung over
one side (ie, carrying the pole front-to-back rather than side-to-side). In
this way the flexibility of the original design is useful.

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hyperion2010
As said by many others: they really aren't taking cost into account. The cost
free solution already exists in many domains, the one I'm most familiar with
is canoe thwarts: [http://www.noahsmarine.com/ucimages/yokes-
lg.jpg](http://www.noahsmarine.com/ucimages/yokes-lg.jpg). Figure out how to
print something with this shape out of plastic and... well you have a hundred
million pieces of plastic that you need to do something with now.

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protomyth
First, great idea and design. I don't normally comment on sites layouts, but
this one has some massive jpegs instead of text and smaller pictures. I am not
sure what they are trying to gain. It actually looks like they don't have the
text at all.

~~~
teleclimber
Yeah at first I thought "hey somebody actually took the time too code an
elaborate HTML page." Then I realized it's all images. The truth is creating a
page like that in HTML is totally possible, but it's a very labor-intensive
and technical process. That's too bad.

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TheSockStealer
So they re-invented the Safety Squat Bar and made it out of wood.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=safety+squat+bar](https://www.google.com/search?q=safety+squat+bar)

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italophil
Nice idea for a rather underserved space. Another start-up in the sector is
StrongArm (www.strongarm.com) a NYC based company that tries to inovate in the
space of weight lifting devices.

~~~
joelittlejohn
strongarmtech.com?

