T-Shirt Printing Device
In my junior spring at MIT I took the class 2.722 D-Lab Design. This class focuses on design in the developing world and, in teams, we worked on projects for clients around the world. In a team of four, I worked on a t-shirt printing device for a woman in the Philippines who had recently lost her t-shirt printing business in a natural disaster. We focused on creating a device that would increase her speed of production, as well as would be easy to recreate and build if another disaster occurred.
We created a system in which the user can quickly create four shirts at a time. Blank shirts slide on to a platform that is rests on a wooden block and is hooked onto the pegs of a beam. The silkscreen is then also hooked on the pegs to keep the design on the shirt straight. Every part of the device is made to be easily taken apart and put together so that the user is able to work on her usual space, a kitchen table, and then take the device apart when it's time to eat.
This project required a lot of communication between our team and our client in the Phillippines. We used Facebook to get in touch and ask questions to better understand how we could help her. While there were times where we could simply send a simple facebook message, having a time when we were all online was valuable. A problem we came across was the time difference, where the Phillippines is 12 hours ahead of Boston. Often we would have a "meeting" with our team on Facebook at 10PM, but for our client it was 10AM. These meetings were incredibly helpful in directing us towards a solution tailored for our client.
We also did a lot of testing of our own. We researched the screen-printing process, built our own silkscreen, and created a design to create t-shirts for our whole class. By doing the process on our own, we found problems to address that our client did not bring up, and ways to improve our device.
