Problem
As our schools, universities, offices and workplaces are adapted to life with coronavirus, facilities such as bathrooms will also need to be amended in two main ways. First, to ensure social distancing protocols are adhered to, and second, to reduce the risk of virus transmission via numerous shared contact surfaces. These need to be achieved whilst maintaining a suitable level of occupancy as determined by the size of building.
Design Brief
Develop a tool, toolkit or process that can enable the safe use of shared bathroom facilities. This could take the form of a product to prevent a person touching surfaces, a process to prevent over-crowding or a means of ensuring thorough hand washing is carried out by all users of the bathroom.
General Guidelines
Remember, all solutions should follow the guidelines below.
Solutions need to embody the values of project clean access and, if they’re to be manufactured, should ideally follow the following design guidelines:
- Seal away the transmission site – all devices should in some way enclose or seal away the parts that make contact with potential transmission sites.
- Be simple, robust, cheap to make and use.
- Either:
- make use of common household or workplace items as part of the device, to save on cost and increase accessibility to all. For example, pens and USB sticks with lids to operate access devices and seal away transmission sites.
- OR be manufacturable by locally available technologies
Submission Guidelines
To be efficient with your time and to reduce the burden of paperwork our submission guidelines are as light-weight as possible, including a short overview/description, details of use, and the all important CAD/CAM models. We encourage the use of photographs and images and just enough information to present the design, its installation and operation. Given this, contributions should be a simple email adhering to the following minimum submission guidelines:
- Provide enough information to describe the design (purpose, typical applications, etc), ideally in the form or a short written summary.
- Contain instruction / guidance for use, ideally in the form of photos or videos.
- If to be digitally manufactured, CAM tractable files be provided for reproduction (eg STLs for 3D printing) and CAD tractable files (STEP or IGES) so designs can be customised or further developed if necessary.
All published designs will be made open access and shared with the global community to aid transition to normality post lockdown. By participating in the Clean Access Challenge you consent to the terms of creative commons license CC BY 4.0.
Get involved
If you would like to get involved, get more information, or submit your own ideas for our design repository, send us an email at project-clean-access@bristol.ac.uk