A Method for Assessing the Sustainability of Design in Developing World Projects

Projects for the developing world usually find themselves at the bottom of an engineer’s priority list. There is often very little engineering effort placed on creating new products for the poorest people in the world. This trend is beginning to change now as people begin to recognize the potential for these projects. Engineers are beginning to try and solve some of the direst issues in the developing world and many are having positive impacts. However, the conditions needed to support these projects can only be maintained in the short term. There is now a need for greater sustainability. Sustainability has a wide variety of definitions in both business and engineering. These concepts are analyzed and synthesized to develop a broad meaning of sustainability in the developing world. This primarily stems from the “triple bottom line” concept of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Using this model and several international standards, this thesis develops a metric for guiding and evaluating the sustainability of engineering projects. The metric contains qualitative questions that investigate the sustainability of a project. It is used to assess several existing projects in order to determine flaws. Specifically, three projects seeking to deliver eyeglasses are analyzed for weaknesses to help define a new design approach for achieving better results. Using the metric as a guiding tool, teams designed two pieces of optometry equipment: one to cut lenses for eyeglasses and the other to diagnose refractive error, or prescription. These designs are created and prototyped in the developed and developing worlds in order to determine general feasibility. Although there is a recognized need for eventual design iterations, the whole project is evaluated using the developed metric and compared to the existing projects. Overall, the success demonstrates the improvements made to the long-term sustainability of the project resulting from the use of the sustainability metric

A Method for Assessing the Sustainability of Design in Developing World Projects

Projects for the developing world usually find themselves at the bottom of an engineer’s priority list. There is often very little engineering effort placed on creating new products for the poorest people in the world. This trend is beginning to change now as people begin to recognize the potential for these projects. Engineers are beginning to try and solve some of the direst issues in the developing world and many are having positive impacts. However, the conditions needed to support these projects can only be maintained in the short term. There is now a need for greater sustainability. Sustainability has a wide variety of definitions in both business and engineering. These concepts are analyzed and synthesized to develop a broad meaning of sustainability in the developing world. This primarily stems from the “triple bottom line” concept of economic, social, and environmental sustainability. Using this model and several international standards, this thesis develops a metric for guiding and evaluating the sustainability of engineering projects. The metric contains qualitative questions that investigate the sustainability of a project. It is used to assess several existing projects in order to determine flaws. Specifically, three projects seeking to deliver eyeglasses are analyzed for weaknesses to help define a new design approach for achieving better results. Using the metric as a guiding tool, teams designed two pieces of optometry equipment: one to cut lenses for eyeglasses and the other to diagnose refractive error, or prescription. These designs are created and prototyped in the developed and developing worlds in order to determine general feasibility. Although there is a recognized need for eventual design iterations, the whole project is evaluated using the developed metric and compared to the existing projects. Overall, the success demonstrates the improvements made to the long-term sustainability of the project resulting from the use of the sustainability metric

Coastal Contacts’ Business Development in the North American Online Retail Eyeglass Market

The following paper is an analysis of Coastal Contacts Inc. and the North American retail eyeglass industry. Coastal Contacts is an online retailer of contact lenses and prescription eyeglasses. At the time of writing the company has recently entered the eyeglasses market. This industry has an underdeveloped online retail channel. The reason the channel has not developed as quickly as other products such as contact lenses is because eyeglasses are a more complicated purchase. As more purchases move online, retail market share for eyeglasses is expected to shift online. This paper looks at how Coastal Contacts can best position itself in order to maximize its benefit from this market shift

Virtual Glasses Try-on System

Virtual Glasses Try-on System Siyu Quan Recent advances in data-driven modeling have enabled the simulation of wearing the glasses virtually based on 2D images (web-camera). For real-life glasses wearing, it needs not only suitable for appearance, but also comfort. Although the simulations based on 2D images can bring out certain conveniences for customers who want to try on glasses online first, there are still many challenging problems ahead because of the high complexity of simulations for wearing glasses. Obviously, it can hardly tell if the glasses are comfortable or can seat on the customer’s nose correctly. Furthermore, customers may want to take a look from different angle to make sure that the glasses selected are perfect. Such requirements cannot be met by using the simulations based on 2D images so we present an interactive real-time system with simulations for wearing glasses, providing users with a high degree of simulation quality including physics application. With our system the user uses the Kinect sensor or the common web camera as input device to acquire the result of wearing the preferred glasses virtually, which is real-time. Input device captures the user’s face and generate a geometry face-mesh which is expected to be aligned to the face-mesh template we pre-set manually. The 3D data captured from Kinect dramatically improve user’s experience by constructing geometry face mesh

Virtual models in online shopping: do they help or hinder customers?

Virtual experience and other technology-dependent methods of describing products online are frequently touted as the way of the future in e-commerce. However, despite the hyperbole, these claims have actually not been tested rigorously on systems used by major online retailers. This paper reports the results of an experiment that assesses user perceptions of the informativeness and ultimate usefulness of systems that use personalization and rich media to enhance the online product evaluation process. Our results challenge the commonly held view that the “high-tech” approach is, in its own right, beneficial to either the customer or the vendor. Key results are (i) the highest levels of informativeness about anticipated (future) experiences were achieved when no personalization systems were used; and (ii) the system that provided the most personalized support was perceived to be least informative about future experience, and least useful overall. Overall, our results indicate that although these systems can improve awareness of some important product attributes, with this enhanced awareness comes a reduced awareness of other product characteristics. At worst, these systems actually appear to make the customer less informed, and result in negative assessments of the retailer

Enhancing Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The measurement of vision and the use of vision aids changed dramatically across the nineteenth century. This thesis explores the retail, manufacture, design, and use of vision aids in this context. The overall argument is threefold. Firstly, that the advancement and professionalisation of medical knowledge of the eye led to the reconceptualization of how vision aids were used, tested and sold. Secondly, that changes in the manufacture and sale of vision aids led to greater numbers being produced, and these were better suited for more long-term wear. Thirdly, it argues that these two changes affected users of vision aids by improving their utility, as well as their accessibility. This is the first major study of nineteenth-century vision aids and how they were used, dispensed and sold. However, it also contributes to our understanding of the Victorian period. New demands were placed on vision and vision aids intersect a range of important areas of Victorian history, including urbanisation, industrialisation, rise of print and education. Additionally, it highlights how an assistive technology can be used to challenge conventional thinking about medicalisation, medical definitions, medical authority and measurement in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, because vision aids could be both fashionable and stigmatised, it provides new perspectives on the process of normalisation and our understanding of impairment in relation to commonality. It highlights scope for the study of minor impairments by showing how the experience of blindness, partial sight, and disability as a whole, cannot be seen as transhistorical. The Science Museum’s Ophthalmology and Dunscombe collections have shaped this research. It reveals how objects can be used effectively alongside textual and visual evidence for the history of vision aids, as well as the history of medicine, retail, design, disability history, and the cultural perceptions that surround vision and its impairment

NETRA: Interactive Display for Estimating Refractive Errors and Focal Range

We introduce an interactive, portable, and inexpensive solution for estimating refractive errors in the human eye. While expensive optical devices for automatic estimation of refractive correction exist, our goal is to greatly simplify the mechanism by putting the human subject in the loop. Our solution is based on a high-resolution programmable display and combines inexpensive optical elements, interactive GUI, and computational reconstruction. The key idea is to interface a lenticular view-dependent display with the human eye in close range - a few millimeters apart. Via this platform, we create a new range of interactivity that is extremely sensitive to parameters of the human eye, like refractive errors, focal range, focusing speed, lens opacity, etc. We propose several simple optical setups, verify their accuracy, precision, and validate them in a user study.Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Research Fellowship