Coronavirus – Opening public doors and pressing buttons… How can we protect ourselves when we interact with daily routines without touching or getting too close to objects across public spaces? Matteo Zallio, visiting postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University, developed an open source personal multipurpose tool helping people to establish a healthy behavior outside of their home in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
- RELATED STORIES: read more COVID-19 related architecture and design…
Handy multipurpose tool is an open source, 3D-printed, resilient response to COVID-19 outbreaks to be used on a daily basis. “Use Handy every day to pull or push a door handle, to open the car door, to push a button and to easily grab grocery bags so we can aim to decrease COVID-19 spread.”
Handy is customizable, easy to carry, personal, ergonomic (with its design that fits fingers of any size, and limits the hand torsion), can be used by right or left-handed individuals and it’s easy to sanitize.
HANDY can be 3D printed at home in under 2 hours. Choose an online 3D printing service, or experiment with different making technologies such as a laser cutter or CNC machining. If you want to have fun with your kids it can also be manufactured by cutting and gluing together layers of cardboard or any material you would like to experiment.
After this situation, many hope to go back to a new normality. What can designers do about it?
“You can’t connect dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future, said once Steve Job.” Says Matteo Zallio to Archipanic.
“Before pointing out what designers can do to re-establishing a “normality” I think we have to carefully look and analyze at what happened and is still happening. This process is pretty similar to what we do when we design: we understand people’s problems in order to capture what they need and then to develop resilient solutions.”
How will we connect the dots?
“Through a call to action, considering the existing dots, probably missing many others. My hope is that these dots will join other dots, and others and others (and many people will take this message and build up on this) and will constitute the foundation for citizen empowerment that is needed to trust that the all the dots will somehow connect for our future.” Concludes Zallio who believes that an open source approach could be a solution.
The key is to share the dots: people will have the capacity to build upon them and to shape a new “normality” exactly as it happened after every big crisis of human history.
Photos and video by Matteo Zallio.
