Alpinight,

Senior Thesis (2020/21)

A Desirable Climbing Helmet

Alpinight is a personal protection and integrative lighting system that aims to simplify gear and weight management while optimizing the multi-pitch climbing experience. Beyond mere utility, Alpinight's aesthetics aim to incentivize the safer and more responsible climbing habit of wearing a helmet. As a designer and climber, I saw the need for a product that promotes safe climbing, while giving climbers a sense of confidence both on and off the wall. Thus, my approach to designing Alpinight was to curb some of the stigmas around helmets by creating a product that climbers would want to wear. The Alpinight helmet features a sleek, minimalist design that instills confidence in the climber without drawing unnecessary attention. Its strategically positioned vents and adjustable fitting system ensure maximum comfort with extended use. The Alpinight headlamp features a similarly minimalist design, that visually and functionally merges with the Alpinight helmet. The headlamp features a one-handed and blind connection through a magnetic attachment system. This mechanism enables reliable lighting on the wall, as well as off when it is removed from the helmet and attached to another accessory mount.


Research

 
 

Precedence & User Research

This first step of the design process consisted mainly of precedence research in the form of mood boards, market research, and user research through surveys and personas.

Ideation

I referenced regulatory head-form sketches and suggested material thicknesses to create a template from which I could rapidly ideate helmet silhouettes. This process would ensure that my design sketches were consistent with the regulatory and safety requirements placed on climbing helmets, in addition to allowing my sketches to be easily translated from paper to CAD software. After refining the preliminary helmet concepts in Adobe Illustrator, I created a survey to analyze climbers’ functional, expressive, and aesthetic needs in a helmet, and to receive feedback on the success of my preliminary silhouettes (with these principles in mind). This survey format was inspired by Investigation of Design Characteristics and Regulatory Requirements for Snowboarding Helmets by May Chay and Sherry Schofield-Tomschin.


Iteration

After receiving feedback from the first survey, I created orthographic sketches of the four most popular helmet designs. I was able to similarly solicit feedback from the climbing community on these four developed concepts. This last round of feedback provided me with enough design direction to begin developing a singular helmet concept. I used a variety of techniques, technologies, and mediums to further develop the helmet and headlamp designs: I primarily relied on Fusion360 for surface modeling, clay sculpting and digital sketching for ventilation design, and 3D printing to evaluate designs in a physical format.


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