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A product design blog containing unique observations, advice and ideas to improve objects from the mind of Product Tank.

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Entries in artificial limbs (1)

Monday
Mar042013

design ideas - don't dredge...Sledge!

Last year I had an idea for modifying trawl doors so that they fished just above the sea bed, reducing destruction to the sea floor, so I made this short video:

    

Then recently I watched the fantastic Hugh's Fish Fight.  One thing the documentary focuses on is how scallop dredging is destroying habitat and sea life (see video on the fish fight website).  The best way to catch scallops is to hand dive for them, so being a designer and having also recently seen programmes about advances to artificial limbs and computer controlled drones, I started to put things together and came up with the idea of drones with artificial limbs being piloted by computer whiz kids either from the boat or from the shore to harvest scallops.

Is this the future?

But also (thinking around the problem) very few areas are currently zoned off for hand diving only, so better commercial solutions need to be sought for areas where dredging is still allowed.  One piece of behaviour I have seen, is that when the scallop is touched, it's response is to try and flee by propelling itself away:

                       

I wonder if this behaviour can be exploited so by slowly pulling a sledge over a bed of scallops, with dangling ropes at the front of the sledge, they can be tickled/nudged into fleeing and then be collected in the back of the sledge?  This would greatly reduce the damage caused by dredging.