We have THE Mask?? By:MFlores

After all the struggles my group and I have gone through we  finally have the one!

When it was time to create a mask I broke my head trying to make my design look like a really high technology surgical mask, when in reality I just had to make  potential customers happy. My bubble mask actually looked like a bubble with two ventilation’s  circles on each side and three little rectangles on top of each circle in order to help the customer breath better. The straps were also adjustable so that it would keep the mask in place and be more effective while people tried to work. Before sharing our masks we had to agree on what we thought were the top 5 most important customer needs, which caused a really heated up debate. Two of our teammates thought ventilation was the most important and the other two thought it was effectiveness.  In my mind it made sense due to the reason why we were creating the mask, which was to  prevent harmful air particles to enter the mask and that was what effectiveness meant for me. But in the other hand ventilation also made sense because people do need to breath through it. After not coming to an agreement we had to ask our teacher which made more sense. Our teacher made us realize that they were almost the same thing but breathing was probably the most important thing that the mask could provide people. When deciding between the other four we didn’t have a problem because it was all common sense. Our final list consisted of ventilation, effectiveness, comfort, ability to cover the face, and re-usability (figure A).

After everyone finished explaining their mask we had to rank them from 1 to 5 on the thing that we thought they had the best and what they were missing. After going through all the masks and deciding, we came to a conclusion that the “L Mask” (Figure B) was most effective mask but just like everything it could use some tweaking. What we decided was that we were going to use the “L mask” outline but add or change the stuff that were better in the other masks.  We then came up with the final product of the “BBD mask” (Figure C). The final “BBD mask” consisted of at least 3 layer of filtration material, band or ties that will hold the mask in place, a silicon nose band, and 2 small air filters.