Individual Designer and Researcher
8 Week Academic Project

After living in Houston during Hurricane Harvey, I wanted to explore how product design could help hurricane victims.

Hurricanes pose a great threat to human safety and communities.
Within recent years, the United States has been severely affected:

Hurricane Ian
The category 5 hurricane affected Florida in 2022, incurring $114 billion in damages.

Hurricane Harvey
The category 4 hurricane affected Houston in 2017, causing the most significant tropical rainfall in U.S. history. 154,170 homes were flooded and it caused $125 billion in damages.

Hurricane Maria
The category 5 hurricane affected Puerto Rico in 2017, causing over 2,900 deaths and inflicting $90 billion in damages.

Hurricane Katrina
The category 3 hurricane affected Louisiana in 2005, causing damage to over 800,000 homes, costing 1,833 lives, and incurring $161 billion in damages.

Atlantic Hurricane Season by Trajectory and Category

Sources: National Weather Service: NOAA (2022)
[1] State Farm [2] Fish and Wildlife Commission
Atlantic Hurricane Season Summary Map

How can local communities be better prepared?

Emergency Radios on the Market

Current emergency radios are expensive and need to be purchased in advance. This poses a challenge for minority communities who are often significantly impacted by hurricanes. Reliable and timely information is crucial during a disaster, and residents can be prone to misinformation and miscommunication.

Design an emergency radio that can be used as a backup.

Minimize to a simpler interface to reduce costs.

Charging: Solar Panel and Manual Charge
Volume and power: Single dial to enable
Tuning: Single dial for FM channels

Radio Reserve features a back-lit screen, convenient rear-facing flashlight, adjustable volume controls, in addition to hand-crank and solar panel charging capabilities.

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Technology

Radio Reserve is a handheld emergency FM radio that utilizes region-specific programming and FM signal-to-text translation to provide reliable, easy-to understand information in both visual and audio formats.

The device is pre-programmed with NOAA’s Specific Area Message Encoding for its region of distribution. Visual text is enabled through an FM demodulator connected to a speech to-text application.

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Application

Radio Reserve is inexpensively manufactured and economically sized to enable relief organizations to mass distribute the devices ahead of hurricane events or other natural disasters.