Covid-19 Face Shield for Hero Products

During the 2020 Covid-19 crisis, Prouza Design Workshop collaborated with IPS3 & Cresta Plastics to design and produce the Hero Shield Covid face shield.

Local medical facilities, led by the procurement team at SA Health, were in need of immediate solutions for their staff, in the absence of the regular overseas imports. At the time, many shields were being 3D-printed by volunteers, but there was a need to scale up production as fast as possible. Using our modular injection mould tooling system, we were in a position to bring a mature product to mass-production in an extremely short space of time.

The Hero Shield was developed over the space of a week, and went through nine versions until we converged on a solution that satisfied all of the technical and user requirements. Once testing and validation were complete, we were able to proceed from approved design to production kickoff in under 1 week, scaling up to a production capacity of around 2000 units per day.

The face shield is designed in accordance with AS1337 and EN166, has TGA approval in Australia, is free of harmful substances and recyclable. The head-frame and elastic strap are sterilisable, reducing the amount of waste normally generated through use of foam-type face shields. This also reduces cost-per-use to a level comparable with product imported from low-cost countries.

Rounding out the project, we designed a packaging system that adresses the needs of procurement, warehousing and agile distribution to individual medical centres.