Dr Bokana's Blog 2: hardships of ICPD week 4

Week 4

HELLO my fellow bokanas, this is Dr Bokana reporting for duty. In my previous blog, I talked about all the information and criteria required to make a good and worthy selection for your Chemical Product idea. 

As I said before, I am currently taking this module called Intro to Chemical Product Design (ICPD) and in the module I am to decide on a design for my Chemical Product idea. To even decide on the type of chemical products I want to do, I have to perform Literature Review. Literature review is basically just looking through your sources and picking out certain needed information and collating them. It is important to remove unwanted information to ensure that your research does not go out of track.

So for our first literature review, we used a source from ScienceDirect about Covid-19 and sustainable solutions for pandemics as such. This made us more interested in airborne diseases and how they spread. BOOM!!! That's when the idea struck my groupmate Vanna , or mostly know as Van Anh.

AIR PURIFIERS LAH ALAMAK!!!! It makes so much sense, air purifiers remove the bacteria in the air by trapping the molecules in a filter. And if Covid-19 is airborne, using an air purifier will ease the situation and even help prevent possible cases. However, we you think deep into it, air purifiers are common household equipment that people already have. NOT TO MENTION the fact that they all mostly serve the same purpose, the most we could improve it would be adding cold ventilation when the purified air exits the purifier SADLY it already exists LOL

So instead of an air purifier, we went in more in-depth. We decided to look at air purifier parts, something easy to produce and cheap to attract customers. The most easily replaceable product is the obviously the filter. It's mostly light and to maintain the efficiency of the purifier the filter has to be cleaned or replaced regularly. Best part is how expensive can a air purifier filter be? It is typically mass produced and usually inexpensive.

After spending 2 hours on doing our literature review and enjoying the music Yan Zhen plays while we do work, we finally decided on having Air purifier Filters as our main topic. And as one of our main concepts behind our chemical product is sustainability, so how about a BIODEGRADABLE one ??? Might as well right, since the filters are disposable and will end up as waste if they are biodegradable won't it benefit the environment??

Next we moved onto our SCAMPER Review. 

So what is SCAMPER?? It is an acronym so its more like S.C.A.M.P.E.R

S - Substitute

C - Combine

A - Adapt

M - Modify

P - Put to another use

E - Eliminate

R - Reverse

What is the point of this SCAMPER review? It allows us to evaluate our ideas and separate them into different categories based on how we modify this certain product. This also allows for creative brainstorming and developing new idea. So when we started our own SCAMPER evaluation, we had quite some trouble thinking of possible modification to air purifier filters.

How much could we even change something so simple such as a filters ?

However, this activity was mainly just for us to spew whatever, REASONABLE IDEA, we could com up with and not anything nonsensical, if my group members read this they will know what I am talking about 🙄🙄. So more of quantity over quality, with some standard of quality lah of course 🤦🤦. After randomly typing out ideas, we thought about which category they fell in. We had this idea of using fiberglass as one of the filter material, this meant that the filter had a longer usage time and also had smaller pores compared to regular filters. This meant that smaller molecules could be trapped in the filter producing cleaner air compared to air purifiers which used regular polyester filters.

After doing our SCAMPER evaluation, we decided to choose the top 4 products/modification, through a democratic vote. Just as our ancestors did AHAHAH. After that we were had do the feasibility analysis, a feasibility analysis as the words suggests helps us see if the product is actually producible within our capacity. This further allowed us to decide which product would be the most reasonable for us to create a prototype of. IF the idea is not feasible it would mean that the product is not preferred to be chosen as our final product.

For example, this the feasibility analysis for one of our ideas. There are a list of yes/no questions and when most of the answers are in the yes region, the more easy it is to produce the products. It also means that the school also has the relevant resources to allow us to complete our idea

We also had to do the COWS matrix, this is also another method to decide if the idea is a good one or not. COWS is also another acronym so its more like, C.O.W.S. So what is COWS?

C - Criteria

O - Options

W - Weightage

S - Score

Basically when we use the Cows matrix, we have to suggest a few criteria to judge our options, aka our top 4 ideas. Since certain criteria are more essential in the making of the product, they tend to have different weightages. These weightages are in percentage and all add up to 100%. We are then to rate from 1 to 3, 1 being the worst idea for this criteria and 3 being the best idea for this criteria. To get the final score, we take the weightage percentage multiplied by the rating we give to the ideas. The idea with the highest score is the most recommended option suggested by the COWS matrix.