KPU team designs protective tents for wildfire crews

So here to speak more on this, we have Sue Fairburn, design instructor at Quantum Polytechnic University. Sue, hi. Good afternoon. Hi, Gloria. Thanks for having us today. Also with us is Carmen Baines, a third year product design student. Carmen, hi, and welcome to you. Hi, nice to have you here. So, Sue, this project was a class assignment. Just what what was the idea behind it? What were the students asked to do? So this project’s one we’ve run every year for the last 5-6 years. Students are given about 8 weeks to essentially scope a project and then hit the ground running and to define what they need to do to solve the project. So it’s a classic design project, but they have to end up the project with a full functioning, like a fully full scale solution that works. OK, So what was the challenge this year? So the challenge this year was to work with the BC Wildfire Services and we met with them couple months prior to the term and they said, well, the problem isn’t always wildfire, the problem is smoke. And even though some wildfire fighters are using respirators, challenges with respirators are are really quite complex. And so really, anything we can do to clean the air that the wildfire fighters are exposed to, whether it’s during a break or overnight, would be a solution. I see. And what year are these students in? Students are in their final term of their third year. All right. So, Carmen, that’s where you come in. What are some of the considerations needed to be accounted for when you’re looking at designing a tent that can protect firefighters from forest fire smoke? Yeah. So some of the constraints we had was dealing with the environment or the context in which our tent was situated on. So our tent in particular with my team, we had focused on the main camp AKA the Firebase camp that was that’s typically set out every fire season per location. And we had some of some materials that we had to take into consideration as well in terms of material selection and seam sampling, all that kind of soft construction that we also had to integrate with the hard materials of side of things, which was the air filter that we had to attach to the tent and seamlessly integrate to create a positive air pressure system. OK. Was portability an issue for you, Carmen? Yes, for sure. So we wanted to tackle a little bit of modularity and portability in our design as well because we know it’s a dynamic camp environment. We don’t know exactly where the fire camps are going to be located every season. And also, we know that the numbers can rise and can fluctuate every time there’s a base camp set up and who’s coming in and who’s coming out. So definitely modularity and collapsibility was big right Now, Sue Carmen just touched on some of the some of the materials. What kind of technology or materials did the students have access to for these projects? Well, we’re really fortunate we get a lot of donated materials at the Wilson School of Design. So they have a lot of technical textiles materials that have some degree of fire resistance, flame resistance, materials that can be waterproof or breathable. And so they students have to sometimes identify what is the right material for the for the needs they have and then how do they actually combine that material with other materials or in this case with an air filter. So this was actually an extra challenging project because the students had to work with the hard and the soft, and that’s not an easy thing to do.