Team:USP-Brazil/Applications

The device

How to design GMOs/GMOs related products?

The design is evolving toward the use of new materials, as the GMOs (Genetic modified organism). It is also learning about the necessities, constrains and possibilities that these materials offer. This year we had the possibility of design/create a container for our biosensor project. This has a user-friendly purpose and a biosafety purpose. You can read more about biosafety in our Biosafey page.

In order to create our container we needed to established the necessities that it should responds to:

• Be portable.
• Helping to collect the sample.
• Prevent contamination of the sample.
• Contain a GMOs.

We needed also to stablished the moments/steps of the user experience:

• Taking the sample.
• Put in contact the GMOs with the sample, preventing GMOs releasing.
• Visualize the sample.
• Inactivation of the GMOs for proper disposal.

After stablished these parameters, we began our creative process, thinking about the best way to respond to all theses constrains. We found that our best choice, because its simplicity and capacity to respond to our/client necessities was a pen-like structure. Knowing this, we developed several design possibilities having this structure in mind.

Figure 1: Designing sketches done at the experimental design phase.
1. Mechanism design; 2. Sampling design; 3. Use proposal.

Developing the device/container

In order to develop a prototype for testing our pen-like structure and its interaction with the consumer, we needed to actually built it. We found that 3D printer could be a great way to materialize our device prototype. This will allow us to develop the testing phase of our design. The currently 3D printer state of art give you a lot of possibilities for doing task like this, but it also imposes some constrains. You cant print

Safe drink detector

See more about the Future Applications