QUICK RELEASE BINDINGS
Wakeboarding Edge Catch Video - Provides context for the project
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For my final year design course at university, me and my team were tasked with finding a new product to build a business around as part of the New Venture Design (NVD) course at UBC. After evaluating various ideas, we chose to develop a quick release binding mechanism for wakeboards that we named SmartRelease. Traditional binding systems are fixed, meaning there is no separating the rider from the board when the board abruptly stops during an edge catch which can lead to serious injuries. SmartRelease aims to mitigate these injuries by releasing the rider from the board during a fall to reduce their impact force with the water.
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Throughout the project I got the opportunity to get involved with both technical and business-related responsibilities. We started by conducting market research and customer discovery before any engineering work took place so that we could identify real world problems that needed to be solved. The process revealed that edge catches from wakeboarding are a major pain point that's causing many people to quit the sport. Once we identified the market and established the product requirements from potential customers, we began designing our binding system to increase rider safety without sacrificing performance. My technical responsibilities included creating a release mechanism that would ensure both feet would simultaneously release from the board, designing components to release at a certain threshold, and integrating the design onto existing wakeboards so we wouldn't have to make the whole system from scratch. Due to the complexity and safety concerns of testing this product, our final build by the end of the course was a proof of concept that showed the technology was feasible if the business were to be developed further. Despite this, our project won the APSC Design & Innovation Day Faculty Award for NVD Teams.