Oz's Chair: Design Award for development for children with disabilities

Ilay Hason and Amit Harel, third-year students in the Industrial Design Department at HIT - Holon Institute of Technology, won second place in the international Helen Hamlyn Awards competition organized by the Royal College of Arts.

Photo: Ilay Hason, Amit Harel, and Oz Shalom Rapaport

Harel and Hason prepared, created, and designed "Oz's Chair" - a special product that attaches to the chair’s legs and keeps it stable thus allows a child with disabilities to avoid falling down due to sudden movements. 

Oz Shalom Rapaport is a 7-year-old boy with cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus from the "Beit Issie Shapiro" center in Ra'anana. His condition has caused slower than usual development of his gross motor skills, making sitting on a chair a challenging and even dangerous task.

"When we first met Oz, we saw that when he sits on a chair or makes a sudden movement, he exerts force and falls due to a lack of gross motor skills," says Ilay Hason. With the valuable help of Oz's physiotherapist, Inbal Azogi, Hason and Harel took the task and designed a round device to which the chair’s legs connect, preventing Oz from falling or pushing the chair even when he makes sudden movements. "The physiotherapist reports that Oz is now performing tasks and actions he couldn't do before," says Hason.

The project was supervised by Prof. Gad Charny and Yichye Shwachman senior lecturers in the Industrial Design Department at HIT - Holon Institute of Technology, as part of the Fixperts course offered by the department.

In the Fixperts course, students in the Industrial Design Department identify a partner ("fixpartner") who has a daily functional need, and through ongoing dialogue, they develop a working product that solves the problem or creates significant functional improvement. This is a unique course both because it involves one-on-one work with a person with disabilities, often with a physical limitation, and because the product must solve the problem. In fact, unlike standard design work for a broad audience, the product of a Fixperts project is given to the "partner" upon completion of the design and development process.

Videos describing the products are distributed worldwide through the website and are intended for the international community of potential users. All projects are designed with an "open source" approach, providing access to files that allow replication of the solution for any other person around the world. Of course, the ability to replicate a solution depends on the complexity of the project - both in terms of technology (3D printing, laser cutting) and the required execution skills. However, most projects are feasible for product designers with access to basic technology.