Firehose Product Design

Refugee Artisan Initiative (RAI) is a nonprofit organization that helps refugee women gain sewing and business skills to help them enter the workforce in the United States. While interning at RAI, I designed products and prototyped them using donated firehoses, concert banners, and coffee bags. 

My job was to come up with a bunch of creative ways to use the materials, which included using a zipper as a connective device, inserting grommets and rope to connect two hoses in a shoelace-style, cutting the hoses open and forming a lattice pattern, etc. I also taught sewing classes to groups of 10+ refugee women and helped these women create websites for their products. Below are some of the products I designed and created.