SFSU graduate students Dan Xiong and Feng Hao Yu reinvent hospital IV pole

SAN FRANCISCO, July 14, 2005 -- An original design for a new type of hospital intravenous (IV) pole recently won an international Industrial Design Excellence Award (IDEA) for San Francisco State University graduate students Dan Xiong and Feng Hao Yu.

The husband and wife team, originally from Guangzhou, China, received the bronze medal in the student designs category for their Dyaun IV Pole. The design and industry majors describe their invention as "a more ergonomic, functional and user-friendly integrated IV-cart."

"[The Dyaun IV Pole] solves so many kinds of functional problems while also enhancing the overall aesthetics," said Martin Linder, assistant professor of design and industry. "That's the role of the industrial designer: to balance the ergonomic issues with the appearance issues."

According to Xiong and Feng, the type of IV pole used by most hospitals has many problems, such as difficult height adjustment and messy wires and tubes. The couple's new IV pole design includes a simple way to organize cables and easy-to-lock wheel brakes. A white and light gray color scheme, matted surface and rounded edges also make the Dyaun IV Pole more aesthetically-pleasing and easier to handle, Xiong and Feng said.

The IDEAs, sponsored by BusinessWeek magazine and juried by the Industrial Designers Society of America, is an annual contest in which product designers are honored in 13 categories. This year's 148 winners represented such companies as Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Nike as well as the nation's top design firms, including IDEO and Design Continuum Inc. In total, this year's contest received 1,380 entries from 30 countries.

SFSU students won two IDEAs in 2003.

Over the years SFSU design and industry students have created countless innovations that have received patents and been manufactured and marketed. Most notable is Charles Hall, who in 1969 experimented with starch-and-gelatin-filled prototypes that would later become the world's first waterbed. Other student inventions include: the Unball, a cross between a softball and bean bag that was popular in the 1980s; and the Hooper, a plastic harness used to carry two-liter soda bottles.