New Orders and More Research! :: Alana C.

This was an exciting week for the JIA Seats team. On Wednesday, December 3rd, we finally received our Graco car seat. We examined all the different features of the car seat, and as we all looked at the car seat, we each made mental notes and discussed briefly what we’d like to change or add to the car seat. We discovered the type of side padding that the car seat had in the head area might need to have more padding. We thought the hard plastic around the head area was nice and sturdy enough to be safe in a car accident, but the padding that touches the head is extremely hard and wouldn’t be nice for a child to lie their head on for a long amount of time. We also found the detachable head piece is extremely flimsy and can be taken off without hardly any force used to pull it off, so we figured the head piece was virtually useless at this point. We want to improve this much more and add more padding to keep the child’s head much more stable in the car seat so whiplash or any moving around that might harm doesn’t occur if there is more padding to prevent the head from moving, which is also expected to help with making sure that there isn’t any discomfort that may turn into a serious problem when a child drifts off and their head goes to the side.

There has been more work with making the 3D models. Teammate Jennifer has been working hard on her computer program to make sure that that part of the project is done. The 3D model is a good way to simply see how this car seat will work and what changes need to be made in order to look at the project as a whole.

The changes to the design proposal has been very helpful. The fact that our group needed to make some changes about being specific about our design ideas and planning has helped a lot because it helps our group focus on better things in terms of how this project will work and how to go about the project in the future upcoming dates. Being able to add more research to our knowledge about our ideas of the perfect car seat helps our group envision better ways to fix the new car seat we got. All these changes seem to be coming together quite well!