Initial Research
For this exercise I took the opportunity to understand ways to improve certain aspects in sports. I am passionate about sports. I took volleyball, badminton and golf as the primary sports as my targets.
There are machines to train an individual, but the training sites end up being a large pile of balls and shuttlecocks. The idea is to collect them with no harm.
I took the challenge of collecting golf balls. There are machines at a golf practice range to collect balls in bulk. There is manual labor involved when it comes to picking balls from pits, near trees and bushes and near rocks.
Market Research
I went to my city’s golf practice range and to a golf course to understand the problem better. The initial interviews with the people working at the range provided me with various key insights. They used a motorized ball collector for the majority of the ball collection. They had to go on long walks to search for the missing balls and at times it was difficult to collect these balls. The manager of the course said that the amount of time taken to pick a ball from a difficult location was the reach of the human hand and the ability to transport it back to the warehouse. The ball collecting bags were difficult to manage and they were mostly non-functional at times straight up a burden on the shoulder.
Problem Statement
To provide a golf ball collection mechanism which is light and easy to use and can be carried for long distances without any stress on the shoulders.
Technical Research
Single ball collector
Mini petal golf collector – This is a petal-shaped collector. It collects a single ball at a time.
Roller based ball retrieving device – This device uses a roller mechanism to collect a single ball at a time.
Tucker ball collector – This device uses a spring-loaded trap door mechanism to collect balls.
King golf ball collector – A claw-shaped ball collector which offers a gripping mechanism.
PGM deluxe shag bag ball collector – This device uses a simple suction mechanism to suck the ball in a chamber and is a small hand-held device.
We also took a peek into multiple ball collection mechanisms.
Rotating ball picker – It contains a plurality of thin disks separated by spacers. These help in collecting multiple balls and depositing them in a basket.
PVC mass ball collector – The PVC stick construction is a simple design to collect balls.
Ideation
Initial idea was to create a mechanism to aid the manual side of operations. This will allow the personal picking the balls from difficult obstacles a leg up.
In each exploration, we tried to understand which mechanism to choose. Each mechanism had its own pros and cons. The mechanism which provided the least stress and most productivity was the suction mechanism.
The ideas were beaten around the bush. We thought of various scenarios of a functional, ergonomic, and aesthetically pleasing design. To make it functional and not to complicate the mechanism we tried understanding the mechanics of a pressure-based system.
With a lot of deliberation, we chose three ideas to create into a small prototype, and eventually into a final prototype.
Prototype
A mood board was created for the creation of the final prototype. We took the theme of retro 70’s and color palette with muted colors. The choice of material was canvas and PVC plastic.
We took the help of a specialized bag maker to create the ball collection bag. He helped us in understanding various types of stitches. We combined leather and canvas as our primary materials. The canvas material had a plastic layer coated in the inner sides.
Testing
The testing of this device was done in a closed environment. The machine was able to catch balls with ease and it could easily hold 250 balls at a time. The weight of the bag made with the balls was not too heavy to carry.
Key Takeaways
The process of understanding the game of golf, the empathy towards the ball collecting boy are deeply ingrained in me. This helped me understand the concept of user experience even better.
