Coolac
“The refrigerator is inspired to create social innovation by providing sustainable, high quality and reliable cooling.”
University project with client – Group work
Advance Embodiment Design course
Duration: 120 days
Design engineering – User experience
The evening milk problem is quite common in Africa. Cows produce milk twice a day; in the morning and in the evening. The morning milk is sold to formal processors. However, the evening milk (40%) is often thrown away since farmers only consume a fraction of it themselves and the individual customers have limited demand.
Cooling the evening milk would prevent the milk from spoiling overnight and enable the farmers to sell it to the formal processors along with the morning milk of the next day. That is why Coolfinity assigned this task to our desing team.
At the same time, this refrigerator is designed to be assembled in Dutch penitentiary institutions, in order to create meaningful work for the detainees and provide them with skills, that will help them integrate smoothly into the society
The material which is used for COOLAC exists for nearly 83% out of stainless steel. The outer housing, inner housing, door, ice bank housing, fan housing and even small cornerpieces, but also screws and rivets are designed to be out of stainless steel.
The handling of the canisters and the ease of use in opening the refrigerator influenced greatly the design of the outer housing. Lifting canisters of 10 [L] in the height of the current types of refrigerators puts a great amount of stress on the joints, especially for elderly Kenyan women. Therefore, the product is designed to avoid muscular disorders.
Ergonomic Research
Successful milk cooling is based on equally distributed air flow around all canisters. To ensure that, two phases of testing were performed, one for the shape definition and one for the shape validation. Physical testing and simulations were used for the testing.
Cool Air Flow Testing
Airflow testing in different layouts.
Airflow simulations on chosen design, run in Solidworks.
Full scale prototype and measuring points for airflow validation.
User Experience: A refrigerator that makes people proud
Both groups involved consider pride highly. On the one hand dairy farmers are in need of reliable cooling that will make them proud of their harvest. On the other hand, dutch detainees need work that fulfills them and makes them proud.
Products that evoke emotions are challenging and have a high risk of failure. To ensure that Coolac is successful in creating the desirable experience, a research phase test and a validation test were conducted with both African farmers and Rotterdam penitentiary institution workshop manager.
Analyzing the results for the testing, farmers and detainees have different needs. Appearance characteristics and a specialty diploma were the outcomes for each group accordingly.
African farmers that participated in the user test.
Design characteristics that evoke the emotion of pride
