Background

Moving dollies are used to transport large, heavy, or cumbersome objects from one place to another. They’re often made of wooden planks with full swivel casters attached underneath.

The Problem

Me acquainting myself with the problem

Especially when loaded with objects that are heavy, low to the ground, and/or oddly shaped.

How might we improve the experience of using a dolly?

To help answer this question, I hosted a workshop that brought together full-time engineers and designers with engineering and design interns to ideate on my leading question.

I told them that their ideas should include an attachment or add-on that can be implemented to the hundreds of dollies around the office. It wasn’t feasible to redesign or alter the dolly itself since there are so many.

Structure

After presenting the background and guiding question, I split the workshop into four parts.

Findings

Voting Results

• Most teams found a C-shaped clamp to be the most effective attachment method.

• Length extension proved important objects that are longer than the dolly itself.

• Pushing was chosen over pulling to prevent fishtailing.

• Some teams considered keeping objects secured to the dolly to be just as important.

Bringing it All Together

Combining the results from my ideation workshop with both my own ideas and the existing solution, I sketched out my final idea. This design improves upon the existing solution by utilizing telescoping tubes that allow you to extend past the edge of the dolly. This means that you can push/pull the dolly when it’s loaded with extra long or extra wide objects.

Existing solution (that I purposefully didn’t mention during the ideation workshop)

My Final Idea

A Quick and Dirty Mock Up

I teamed up with the model shop interns to create a mock up out of scrap sheet metal and aluminum tubing. We created this mock up in a day and a half.

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Learnings & Takeaways

• Though the mock up didn’t work perfectly, it did demonstrate that the telescoping tubes served their intended purpose.

• The critical dimension is the width of the C-clamp. The mock up’s width was too wide, which made it difficult to bite onto the edge of the dolly.

• The gauge of the sheet metal is what affects the overall strength of the attachment. The gauge on my mock up wasn’t strong enough, so the material bent when I tried to use it.

• My main takeaway though was that your first mock up probably won’t work, but that’s ok! It taught me what needed to be changed for the next prototype.