Helping firefighters by design
by Vincent Ciccarello
Years
of experience as a Country Fire Service volunteer convinced Liam Fudali
there had to be a better alternative to the cumbersome conventional
firefighter's breathing apparatus harness.
And so last year, as a final year industrial design student, he worked on making the harness lighter and more flexible.
"If you use something enough, you begin to find faults with it and to think of ways it could be improved," Fudali said. "The experience I gained through industrial design gave me the tools and the skills required to redesign the harness, I think, very effectively."
The judges of the prestigious Australian Design Award® obviously agreed, awarding FLEX - Improved Harness Design for Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus the Dyson Student Award Silver Prize in May. With it came $2000, a Dyson vacuum cleaner and an invitation to the glittering awards ceremony in Sydney.
The Graduate spoke with Fudali on his first day as a technical illustrator with Tenix Defence's land division which designs, manufactures, modifies and repairs all major in-service military vehicles in Australia. He said he was glad he paid attention when an Australian Design Award® representative visited the University early in 2005 to talk about the competition.
"As my project progressed, I realised I definitely had something that was worthy. As well as doing my best in my project, I thought it'd be good to enter the Dyson and see how it compared with what everyone else in Australia was doing."
Peter Schumacher, UniSA's Industrial Design Program Director and Sandy Walker, fourth year course coordinator, said Fudali's work was worthy of the prize because it took on a serious problem and developed a unique solution that was superior to existing designs.
"His design greatly improved the quality of the lives of the product's users through the development of a harness which substantially increases the user's mobility and the equipment's ease of use under arduous operating conditions," Schumacher said.
"Liam applied user-observation and ergonomic analysis and had ongoing dialogue with users to develop a complete understanding of the problem. He worked with materials suppliers and manufacturers to ensure his designs were technically achievable. And he applied creative thinking to the project and sought new means of doing things. In short, he acted as a competent and professional designer," Walker said.
Fudali has a provisional patent on FLEX and is in the process of contacting manufacturers in the US, Germany and Sweden to determine their interest in manufacturing or licensing the product.