Pulaski Redesign

A safety-focused, user-centered case study of a common firefighting tool.

Overview

Our project is focused on ways to better protect wildfire firefighters. The goal of this project is to design a more comfortable and forceful Pulaski to aid the efforts of wildlife firefighters.

Loose hoes and short handles impose unnecessary risks on firefights who are creating firelines. Firefighter safety is our goal in making this product.

Roles

User Research, User Testing, Product Design, 3D Modeling

Tools

Adobe Suite , Rhino 3D

Duration

6 weeks, 2021

Team

4 people

Research

Initially, we explored technological innovations, tool improvement, and health tracking. Interviews, observations, and survey responses helped us comprehend wildfire firefighting, the dangers, distinctions from other firefighting types, important tools, and necessary improvements. We identified a need to redesign the pulaski, the most crucial and frequently used tool, to address safety issues and improve awareness. Therefore, we focused on the pulaski for task analysis to make a tangible difference for firefighters.

How might we better protect woodland firefighters?

Ideation

Our observations allowed us to learn about the current market and field situation and areas that require improvements. Doing field research was not possible due to time constraints and fire season coming to an end. Therefore we opted to watch videos of firefighters on the field sharing their experiences and opinions. We gathered the plethora of information found into a simple list of the most important information which seemed constant across several sources. Observations helped us get a clearer image of where we wanted to take this project.

Testing

After sketching hundreds of possible designs for a new Pulaski tool, we complied the most important features into three main versions. After sketching them, we went back to the people we'd interviewed in the first stage of the process to get their responses and feedback. This served as our user testing to help us keep iterating until our final version.

Final Design

We spoedt time compiling the features that worked well in our user testing into a final design.

Takeaways

This project was a strong foundation for me as I started to understand the process of designing something that is meant to be used by the hands of someone other than myself. I'm not a firefighter and know very little of the profession, but being able to break down this design process into very small steps gave me every chance to empathize with the users' challenges.

If I were to do this project again, I'd like to be able to talk to even more users about their experience. While we had a variety of first-hand and second-hand sources, I still believe that there is a lot more to learn about how this tool works—I'd even like to be able to use it in my own hands.

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