To first come up with a concept, I needed to look at the market to see what worked, and what did not. I even went on an empathic testing journey, putting myself in the shoes of my user. The most effective item was a grab bar, but it lacked one feature: portability. From there, I came up with the idea of a portable grab bar attached to the wheelchair. I started with some basic sketches but realized quickly that this was a project where the main focus was design through prototyping. It was function first, and to do that, I needed to prototype and test all the time. I went through four main prototypes, all serving their own need and increasing in fidelity, going from cardboard, PVC, and then to metal. The metal one was used the most, as it was created for user testing, weight-bearing purposes, and fitments. After prototyping, it was all about the small refinements, and finding out all the inner mechanisms. These were done through simple foam-core mockups, to full-on computer simulations. One of the most important parts was finding out how it would fit different wheelchairs, which was done by researching the differences in wheelchairs to find a main common ground to work with to make this an off-the-shelf product. The last step was to finalize everything into a cohesive 3D model.