Recently, the winners of the iF Product Design Awards 2024 were announced. The laparoscopic surgical instrument designed and developed by the team of XJTU, consisting of Associate Professor Li Hongwei from the Industrial Design Department and Associate Professor Zhu Zicai from the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems of the School of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Li Xiaoling from the Institute of Engineering & Medicine Interdisciplinary Studies, and students Zhang Yifan, Ma Li, Zhu Zhixian, Zhong Jiaqian, Yin Yizhen, and Shen Xiru from the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Joint School of Design and Innovation, won the Medical Device Product Design Award depending on its ingenious creativity and excellent innovative design quality. This is also the first time that the university won the iF international design award for medical devices.
The winning product, Cross Well DG100, is a miniature laparoscopic instrument for surgical applications. The trackball operation mode proposed by the team can realize 360° rotation and 90° bending of the instrument head, so that the doctor is able to precisely control the angle of jaws without turning his/her wrist even in the narrow abdominal cavity, thus reducing the fatigue of the doctor’s wrist and improving the surgical safety. At the same time, the handle and operating experience are ergonomically designed and optimized. The product adopts three-tube star-shaped handle, which fits tightly into the palm, reduces wrist fatigue, and ensures safety, comfort, and stability during long-time use. The design work was completed by the team of teachers and students after more than a year of design iteration.
The team integrates ergonomics and user-centered design and employs the design methods for functional visibility to create a safe, effective, efficient, and comfortable operating mode and experience for clinical and laboratory users. With its emotional design language and efficient development, the winning work combines clinical needs, technical feasibility, and aesthetic experience; it creates a unique gripping and operating mode while maintaining harmony and unity between the product and the hospital environment; it ingeniously integrates complex technologies into clinical technology through design thinking and increases the added value of the product. It reflects the great potential of industrial design to drive the engineering & medicine interdisciplinary product design and development.
Since its establishment for more than a year, the Joint School of Design and Innovation has advocated the cultivation philosophy of “emerging engineering, grand design, and interdisciplinarity emphasis”, kept learning and innovating in practice, broken through traditional thinking, and encouraged the crossing and integration of disciplines. The advantages of Chinese-foreign cooperative school running allow students to explore and practice at a larger stage. Yin Yizhen and Shen Xiru from Milan Class 2204, Industrial Design worked closely with the team, unleashed their creativity, and gained growth under the guidance of teachers and seniors
