What started out as a class project for two Florida State University students in a graduate-level furniture design class turned out to be a collaborative design idea that has the potential to save lives.
The “Cradle of Hope” (named after the HOPE Community transitional shelter) designed by Sean Coyne, a facilities engineer from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Rachelle McClure, an FSU interior design alumna, is a baby cradle engineered specifically for infants of parents in a homeless shelter.
McClure and Coyne have already received a patent and applied for a grant to build a prototype of the cradle in hopes of getting their product into not only HOPE Community, but also into shelters across the nation, and possibly the world.
Coyne and McClure visited HOPE three summers ago and were concerned when informed that the shelter had difficulty obtaining and accommodating space for cradles.
This information worked its way into a class project the two students had.
“We were given a challenge to come up with a cradle that would work in that space,” said Coyne.
Coyne said that because space is a limiting factor in shelters, a mother would have to sleep in a single bed with her infant, which is not safe for the baby. According to Coyne, strangulation and suffocation is one of the leading causes of infant death, one of the factors being that it is possible for a parent to mistakenly roll over onto their child while sleeping during the night.
Read the full story at the Florida State News.
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