Easy Tech Safe Trek Modular system of mountaineering devices

“Mountaineers even break their toothbrush in half to reduce weight and save space”. This was the inspiration for this design exploration that concentrated on three main issues: ergonomic distribution, weight, and battery-power issues.

The exploration began by separating all the existing mountaineering devices into their useful components of inputs, processing and outputs.

The next step was to see how to target redundancy in device functions and components. Separating and fusing the brains “processors” of all the devices created a hub. This also gave a great advantage of allowing various device functions to take advantage of each other’s functionalities for eg. the palm top could ask the camera to take photographs, ask the gps for the location and then send the photograph over the gprs network through the mobile phone function.

The inputs and outputs were broken down further questioning their need as well as ergonomic placement. The quantity and quality of the input and output interfaces was also put under light as all of them were seen to be constructed out of the context. An interactive glove that senses finger movements and hand gestures as the system input while a unique Head-Mounted-Display, called the Eyetap, for output functions were some of the explorations.

Hence the system finally developed for mountaineers allowed the user to access the various functions of all the devices and much more due to a shared processing hub. He could also access complicated technological device functions through input and output interfaces specifically built for the context.

The various design changes not only increased the functional and energy efficiency of the mountaineering devices, but also augmented substantially their safety.