Redesigning the traditional Chinese shoulder pole

http://www.peiwuyang.com/shoulder-pole-design-research

by xwowsersx • 11 years ago

56 57 11 years ago

italophil• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

strongarmtech.com?

kookiekrak• 11 years ago

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.

txu• 11 years ago

It's also my question. A working design must also be cheap. The "A liter of light" project is a great example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Fpsw_yYPg

The prototypes shown are far from achieving cost effectiveness it seems.

ars• 11 years ago

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?

jrochkind12• 11 years ago

I think there are two possible answers.

A) There is a hidden advantage of some sort to the current design that the designers in OP are not aware of or not taking account of. It could just be cost as another poster suggested, or something else.

B) No good reason at all, just tradition. I can't find it now, but there was a post on HN asking why we still used the traditional Western wheelbarrow in our countries, when the Chinese wheelbarrow (what a coincidence!) was so obviously superior. The Chinese wheelbarrow has the wheel in the middle, so the wheel bares the load and the human just needs to push/steer.

kimbo305• 11 years ago

So they've been using this pole for 1,000 years.
What makes me different from them?

You probably don't have the experience of use that comes with 1000 years. Or even one summer.

As I see it, the tool is already adequate. Especially in bamboo form, the pole has some flex and a smooth surface. Adding curved wood or fabric would cause additional rubbing wear. In the case of curved wood (and some of the prototypes), you lose versatility in how you can use it.

When these guys go up and down narrow stairs, they follow each other closely, each leading with one basket higher and in front. The designs that lock into the torso would make navigating steps and quick direction changes harder.

dengnan• 11 years ago

For cost consideration? Those poles are made of bamboos which is probably the most inexpensive materials in ancient China and it's easy to get. The shape of the poles is exactly the same as the raw materials. So people only need to cut the bamboo and that's it. No need to do any further work. Bamboos grow very fast and straight. This makes it have very low defective rate.

Imagine there was no plastic, no composite wood. You had to find a large piece of wood to do even a small design. Plus, if there was really a needs for alternatives, there was Chinese weelbarrow [0].

http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarr...

peterashford• 11 years ago

Well obviously you're an enlightened westerner and therefore inherently more clever.

Or perhaps there are other reasons why the simple solution is preferred. I honestly don't know. What I wouldn't do is infer that they're all stupid because they've not thought to do what is obvious to you.

_cudgel• 11 years ago

Why did they not try to improve it themself?

What makes you think they haven't tried to improve it in a thousand years? Or that every other person that makes their own pole doesn't have some little tweak to improve it only for themselves?

What am I missing?

I don't mean to be rude by saying this, but: humility?

zhemao2• 11 years ago

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.

JulianMorrison• 11 years ago

In the west, there were shoulder yokes made in roughly a long oval form, with a deep notch for the neck, and carved shoulder pads.

Example: http://www.objectlessons.org/work-and-innovation-victorians/...

The difference is the availability of wood. You would need a truly epic bamboo bole to make anything like that, but one ordinary plank would suffice over here.

contingencies• 11 years ago

Yes. In fact, there are a number of advantages offered by the current design that have not been discussed. As I live in the area and have lots of experience seeing people use these in Southeast Asia and southern China (where I usually live), here's some off the top of my head:

1. Quick to make from local, natural, sustainable, free materials. You just split half a piece of bamboo (fast growing, flexible, everywhere in southern China/South/Southeast Asia). Can be replaced almost in-situ if broken, stolen, destroyed by local police/mafia, etc.

2. Easy to balance. The most traditional use of these sorts of poles is for bringing large loads of produce through paddy fields. In order to do so, one must frequently balance on thin muddy paths and cross streams. This is in addition to the steep and rocky terrains mentioned.

3. Easy to unload (drop the pole), without losing or upsetting your load. Thus, deniable in places where traditional street vendors are currently being pushed out by local police. (See also #1)

4. Cool and stays out of the way. Does not impede airflow to body or movement of head which may need to wear a large-brim hat. Critically important in hot and/or wet terrain, and steep terrain.

5. Can spin on the shoulder. Forward-backward orientation for thin paths (through people, planted or natural vegetation, traffic, thick foliage, rocks) or left-right orientation for lower shoulder load where feasible.

6. Skilled operators can rapidly and easily switch supporting position from the left to right shoulder very easily even under heavy load. This facilitates rest for part of the shoulder which largely offsets the alleged discomfort under high load and prolonged use.

7. To place or pick up light to medium loads (eg. mobile food preparation equipment that may include hot coals, boiling water, or similar ... relatively commonly seen in parts of Vietnam), it is sometimes useful to bend rather than fix your back in order to ensure a shock-free placement, at which point the proposed body-mounted supports become restraining.

I would also point out backpacks or harnesses of the type proposed do already exist but are usually used in different situations, ie. to carry heavier loads closer to the back up mountainous terrain where balance and wide, vegetation/rock-free paths cannot be guaranteed. Examples at http://www.tinyadventurestours.com/images/Rural/RuralYunnan4... and http://runawayjuno.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Shaping_Mo... and http://factsanddetails.com/media/2/20090524-Yi%20Carrying20L...

pnathan3• 11 years ago

Yes, I think that this design project is interesting, but suffers from "wealthy person syndrome". If a couple bamboo poles can be easily lashed in a different way to deal with the back issues, that will likely suffice and solve the specified problem without creating an over engineered expensive "solution".

cheepin• 11 years ago

A few more observations based on my experience with heavy squats.

1.) If the weight gets misplaced, a simple straight bar can be rolled back up to a more "comfortable" position. A curved (C shaped) bar under load finds an equillibrium point and you can't really move it out of that point without deloading.

2.) You can take a really wide hand stance for extra balance if needed. Really nice if the weight is uneven.

3.) Damage control. There are much worse things than bruising across the shoulders. The posture of walking with a pole across your back is really not very bad provided you have adequate core strength. A few of their solutions look like they could cause bad back problems over the long term.

hwz• 11 years ago

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)

protomyth2• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

serf• 11 years ago

This unfortunately excludes all users' of screen readers from enjoying this content. I think you were right to comment on it.

titanomachy• 11 years ago

... 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?

solox3• 11 years ago

Yeah, the Chinese have a unit of measurement called "yi" which is exactly 0.1 billion.

b62• 11 years ago

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.

protomyth2• 11 years ago

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

gggmaster• 11 years ago

Because in Chinese there is a word "万" for ten thousands.

sqrt17• 11 years ago

Germany in the 1700s/1800s had similar shoulder poles for carrying water: 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.

pnathan3• 11 years ago

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

mmilano• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

ChuckFrank6• 11 years ago

You are correct. Fixed fulcrum, not a good idea. Non-fixed fulcrum, a great idea. The existing design is better on this case.

simonsayscode• 11 years ago

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• 11 years ago

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.

TheSockStealer• 11 years ago

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

https://www.google.com/search?q=safety+squat+bar

peteretep• 11 years ago

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

http://www.bodybuilding.com/fun/betteru50.htm

darkmighty• 11 years ago

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!

jdonaldson• 11 years ago

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.

ChuckFrank6• 11 years ago

Yes, the pivot as well.

dylanbox• 11 years ago

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

bobbles• 11 years ago

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.

eCa2• 11 years ago

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

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

dmix• 11 years ago

Reminds me of 'Emotional Design' book by Don Norman

http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Design-Love-Everyday-Things/...

A typical designer will view functionality/usability as the ultimate goal, which often fails in practice because they ignored the other 50% - the emotional, sometimes irrational, side of value perception in products.

This is critically important in industrial design.

For example two emotional things stand out in your story:

a) the metal version seems tougher than plastic, appearing to be stronger aesthetically, even if it doesn't do a better job for the use-case

b) a local person made it, creating a local emotional connection to the products

tdaltonc• 11 years ago

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...

hyperion2010• 11 years ago

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. 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.

ChuckFrank6• 11 years ago

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

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.

ChuckFrank6• 11 years ago

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

ChuckFrank6• 11 years ago

mmilano mentions benefits of non-fixed fulcrum as well.

Redesigning the traditional Chinese shoulder pole

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