Finished PPE Gown
Overview
Elder Care Alliance, a senior living facility in Oakland, highlighted the lack of variety and comfort in clothing for older adults—something I hadn’t considered before but was motivated to address. My team was testing prototypes for adaptive clothing when COVID-19 hit, and frontline staff faced a PPE shortage. We quickly pivoted, sourcing materials and volunteers to produce 200 non-surgical gowns in a month. This page focuses on the PPE project, which we were able to bring to completion.
Project Length: August 2019 - June 2020
Client: Elder Care Alliance
Role: UX Researcher, Scrum Master
Collaborators: Yoyo Ko, Shirley Jiang, Josie Lee
Tools Used: Notion, Google Forms, Canva, Zoom, fabric cutting patterns
Secondary Research
In weekly meetings with Rosemary Jordan, VP of Business Development and Strategy, we learned ECA’s PPE inventory was rapidly dwindling as shipments fell through and prices soared. With frontline workers at risk, we had to act fast. In the uncertain early days of the pandemic, we explored alternative PPE options while ensuring safety came first. To move quickly, our team split responsibilities by PPE type—face shields, masks, gowns, booties, and caps—researching everything we could within a week.
Posing with rolls of fabric that would soon be sen into PPE equipment.
My Role In Secondary Research
I was responsible for learning all there is to know about face masks.
1. Reviewing CDC safety requirements
2. Investigating community-made alternatives for frontline masks
3. Analyzing materials and their filtration capabilities
4.Assessing material availability and accessibility
5. Estimating production costs per mask
6. Calculating time required for mask production
7. Researching sterilization guidelines for production spaces
8. Identifying PPE needed for volunteers to prevent potential contamination
After finding this information and coming together we made 5 different google docs outlining our plan for that particular PPE. Below images are a few screenshots of a few parts of the face mask plan.
Results
After we came up with a plan on how we would create PPE we created flyers we created flyers and sent them to all UC Berkeley students and posted on social media.
We had 40 volunteers initially and towards the end of our efforts we had 80 volunteers resulting in the production of 500+ PPE for frontline healthcare workers. This was one of the most rewarding and heart warming experience as a designer and human.
Please feel free to read more in depth about this effort on a Medium article written about our work named Honors Team Adapt responds to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
