Sharps Container

The goal for this project was to design and build a sharps container for discarded cutting blades. The container will hold blades used in L024 and can be thrown away with the garbage. 

Kalyani and her partners from the initial class worked to develop the design concept for the sharps container. The container consists of two pieces: a styrofoam box with a top and a sheet of cardboard. She and her group opened a small slit in the top of the container, where the sharps could fall through to the bottom. They then wanted to solve the problem of how you keep the sharps from coming back out of the container through the small slit. They used a piece of cardboard, and bending it in half into a triangular shape, made a sharps guard. (See Diagram below) On either side of the guard there are small slits that allow for the sharps to slide through to the bottom. The guard makes it difficult for the sharps to come back up and out. The top of the triangular piece was also set into the box so that it was perpendicular with the slit through which the sharps were deposited. This helped to limit the possibility that the sharps would then fall back out the slit. The exterior decoration is red and orange. We wanted an exterior that would imply but not out rightly state that there were sharp objects within the container. We used triangular shapes to denote the presence of sharp objects within the container. We used arrows to denote where one should deposit the sharp objects.