During my first-year design class at Northwestern, our team was given creative freedom to address a real-world problem that personally resonated with us. The timing was serendipitous - Chicago was experiencing particularly rainy weeks, and as any local knows, Chicago's notorious winds create a perfect storm for umbrella failure. Our team repeatedly faced the frustration of umbrellas inverting during rainstorms, leaving us soaked despite our best efforts at protection.
This common yet overlooked problem became our inspiration:
How might we improve umbrella stability?
Rather than immediately jumping to solutions, the team began with comprehensive user research:
Our research uncovered a crucial insight that fundamentally shaped our solution: Users were reluctant to purchase entirely new umbrella designs, regardless of promised improvements. Instead, they strongly preferred affordable attachments that could enhance their existing umbrellas. This insight prevented us from pursuing what would have been a misguided direction - designing a better umbrella from scratch - and instead pointed us toward a more user-friendly attachment solution.
Based on research findings, we developed the Funbrella buffer concept - an attachment that significantly improves the structural integrity of any standard umbrella.
Personal Contribution
My primary responsibility was to design the resin caps that would securely attach the buffer to the umbrella ribs. This component was critical to the success of the overall design, requiring careful consideration of:
We conducted rigorous testing to validate our design under realistic conditions, using a leaf blower to simulate Chicago's powerful winds. The results were definitive - our prototype demonstrated significant improvement in wind resistance compared to standard umbrellas, preventing the frustrating inversion experience that initially inspired our project.
This project reinforced a fundamental design principle that has influenced all my subsequent work: always keep users at the center of the design process. Had we skipped our thorough user interviews, we would have created an improved umbrella rather than an attachmentâa solution that would have missed addressing users' actual needs and preferences.