Diseño de un sistema expositor móvil para la protección y comercialización itinerante de flores eternas en espacios públicos

Abstract

The itinerant trade of preserved flowers in Ambato, Ecuador, faces a structural problem: the street vendors, who comprise 74.8% of the self-employed workforce in this sector, display their products in an improvised manner, which fails to protect the merchandise and, even more so, their working conditions. Dust, solar radiation, and rain damage the goods; workdays of up to eleven hours without the use of ergonomic equipment result in musculoskeletal injuries in a group whose income depends on the visual quality of their product. This research falls within the design, materials, production, identity, sustainability, and applied technologies research line of the Technical University of Ambato and employs a qualitative approach and an action research methodology, combining direct observation, semi-structured interviews, individual validation and document analysis to develop a design proposal based on empirical evidence obtained from the vendors. The Design Thinking methodology structures the process in five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test, ensuring that each decision is based on needs verified in the field. The scientific innovation lies in the FLORAXIS mobile display system: a modular metal structure with a transparent enclosure, internal shelves, and differentiated wheels for irregular surfaces, whose dimensions are determined using Latin American anthropometric data (Ávila Chaurand et al., 2007). Validation with a real user yielded a score of 86 out of 90, confirming that the design has a positive impact on the protection and mobile sale of preserved flowers in public spaces in Ambato.