In the spring of my freshman year at Olin I took a course that changed both my way of thinking and the direction of my study while at Olin. Engineering for Humanity was a combined design and engineering course in which students were paired with older adult community partners to design something for them.
I, along with two others, were paired with Bob Bohmiller of Framingham, MA. Bob was in the unique situation of missing a hip on one side of his body. We started the project with many ideas of how to improve different everyday actions for Bob, and ultimately we decided the most impactful would be overhauling his stair railings. When we started, Bob was using a crutch and a single, metal, flat, white railing to make his way up the stairs, painstakingly and slowly. We prototyped different heights and shapes of railings with Bob, and we secured the help of a local contracting company to install the railing-- for free. When we finished, Bob had wood railings on both sides of the stairs, with a customized height and shape. His passage up the stairs was still slow, but much safer and less painstaking. |
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