Demountable Rock Wall Research Project Phase 2

Around the world, there are many natural disaster camps filled with displaced people who have lost their homes to the elements of nature. In these communities, there is a lack of playground equipment for children. Not only are playgrounds physically beneficial, but they also provide children a means of strengthening social skills, as well as impacting them emotionally and allowing them to express their imagination. Because of the benefits that playgrounds provide to children, it is important that communities have access to playgrounds. To combat this issue, we have designed demountable playground equipment, specifically a rock wall, to provide to these dislocated communities. We focused our design on demountability after previously researching user design. The stakeholders who are relevant in this situation are children, parents, other community members, deployers, manufacturers, and investors. In the first phase of our research, our design was user-centered, and our main focus was the primary users, the children. For the second phase, deployers of the rock wall will be our main focus. We have decided that the requirements for the deployer stakeholder will be vehicle transportation, size reduction, and stability of the rock wall. Four different concepts were created and ranked according to the specifications based on the stakeholders’ requirements. We ranked these concepts using a Pugh chart and the resulting information was translated to create a 3D model. Because we are focusing on demountability of the rock wall, our design includes aspects that allow our rock wall to be folded into a compact structure that can be easily transported. This model could be manufactured into a full-scale prototype for our observation of interaction with users and deployers. Using our design, rock walls can be transported to the many natural disaster camps that do not have access to playground equipment.