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SafeC
Through the Whitespace Design Challenge, myself and a group of 3 other students were tasked with finding a gap in the market and creating a product to fill it. We found the women’s safety market was missing a product that fulfilled our and the community’s needs and eventually created SafeC: a wearable device that provides the safest directions to get home, an alarm to deter attackers, and a direct line to emergency services.
Role / Project manager
Date / Winter 2020
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Skills / Design thinking, Product design,
Market analysis, CAD
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65% of women have experienced street harassment.
This statistic astounded us as we were doing research. 85.2% of those we surveyed from our own community shared they have felt unsafe walking home. We let this problem drive us as we initially started market research, stakeholder analysis, observational research, and user interviews.
Safety products are available, but not being used.
Surveys and user interviews uncovered that users did not feeling comfortable using or did not see the benefit in the safety products currently on the market. From our research, we came to understand our users' unmet needs, and where these were derived from.
A discreet, versatile, easy to use product
These three criteria were the main needs we were hearing from interviewees. As we searched for a solution, the best piece of advice we received was from the local police: nothing can replace awareness when it comes to safety. We decided our product would work to improve awareness while still being discreet, versatile, and easy to use.
Functionally, the product would provide directions and a safety rating of the area users are in, on a color scale from red to green, in the hopes of keeping users off their phones and aware of their surrounding. Additionally, there would be an alarm to deter attackers and a direct line to notify emergency services, if a situation did arise. These added features are only offered individually in other safety devices on the market, never together.
Brainstorming
Final design features:
Front with screen
Back with button for attachments
An accompanying app would also be offered to view the safety map, input destinations, and activate the phone’s speaker when the alarm is deployed.
Next Steps
We began to draft a provisional patent and create a business plan before COVID-19 cut the project short. Because of the pandemic the progress of this project stalled, but the group is still in contact if any new developments occur.
Our full presentation, a finalist in the Whitespace Design Challenge, can be seen here.
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