Development of an Innovative Quickdraw for Climbers

Sammanfattning: This master thesis is a product development project conducted with Mammut Sports Group AGin Seon, Switzerland. The goal of this thesis was to reconsider the concept of quickdraws, which are used for lead climbing, and to come up with a new system. Mammut Sports Group AG founded in 1862 is today a leading supplier for alpine climbing and outdoor equipment, its products are well-known for their high quality, functionality and being innovative. Quickdraws follow mainly the same system since decades, two karabiners connected through a sling, one karabiner to clip to the protection on the wall, the other to clip in the rope. The two karabiners barely differ except sometimes the gate. A new concept should take safety, weight, price and usability into account. Extensive investigation of how quickdraws are used was conducted to spark ideas for the new concepts. Literature, standards and climbing organization reports of accidents and usage advices were studied. Market and patent research was conducted to investigate what has been already released and tried out on sell. Further, the approach of Netnography, Shadowing and Storyboard was applied to get user insights. The developed ring-karabiner side presents a safer gate against unintended gate-opening compare to traditional karabiners, and with this it should increase safety. Through the new shape a fixation to the sling is possible and even necessary, compare to traditional quickdraws where the sling requires being free movable around the karabiner protection side. This can make it possible to fulfill some climber’s additional need to reach protections from slightly further distance and increase safety. Production price and weight are estimated to keep equal with traditional karabiners. Some users recognize the new product with positive enthusiasm indicating that there is a potential market. To summarize, with help of different ideation and concept development methods, a totally new quickdraw ring karabiner-concept of clipping into the protection on the wall was developed. In loops the concept was validated and developed further to meet the requirements. Moreover, using method for concept-testing it was important to investigate how the potential user would consider the new model.