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What: the Wheelchair Poncho, designed by 55 Minutes with SalvageGarden volunteers and caregivers
Awards: Human-Centered Design Award 2026 (August 2026) and Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2026 (October 2026)

Ever tried to hold an umbrella and push a wheelchair at the same time?
In Singapore, rain doesn’t wait for anyone — and for a wheelchair user and their caregiver, a sudden downpour is more than an inconvenience. It takes two people and two umbrellas to keep one wheelchair user dry, and that’s on a relatively clear day. Push the umbrella yourself and you can’t see where you’re going. As Brenda, one of the caregivers who worked on this project, put it: “When you’re pushing the umbrella with the wheelchair, you can’t see! There’s this mushroom in front of you… you can’t even navigate.”
That was the problem our volunteer Francis had been trying to crack for months. His mother is a stroke survivor, and he knew the problem first-hand: how can a caregiver keep a wheelchair user dry in the rain while holding an umbrella and manoeuvring the wheelchair at the same time?

It started with a crutch and some cable ties

Francis’s first answer was pure SalvageGarden: a crutch, cable ties and clamps, holding an umbrella to a wheelchair. The crutch’s lightweight frame and adjustable grip points let him set the umbrella’s height and angle for better coverage. He shared it with us in May 2025 and asked the obvious question — do you have any ideas to make it sturdier, safer, or more user-friendly?

We kept at it. Our volunteers iterated on the idea through the year — the rain-shield prototype on this blog is that same journey, phase by phase: upside-down crutches for a rear pillar, plant support bars for a frame, a shower curtain for a roof. Each version taught us something. A flat roof pooled water until it sagged and leaked. A frame anchored to the footrests made a “narrow gate” that was hard to get into. Solving one problem kept re-introducing another — which, if you’ve ever made anything, you’ll know is just how making goes.

Phase 2 of the rain-shield prototype — the crossed bars that forced the cover into a dome so rain would roll off instead of pooling. Read the full build in our February 2026 post. Photo: SalvageGarden.

Then the designers came to the makerspace

Meanwhile, 55 Minutes — a UX design studio here in Singapore — was running an initiative called Inclusive Inquiry, asking communities for real problem statements around accessibility. Francis submitted his: the umbrella problem, the one he’d been working on for months.
So the designers came to us. In participatory sessions facilitated by the 55 Minutes team, Francis sat down with fellow volunteers and caregivers Brenda Boey, Carol Boey, and Annie Ong — the people who actually live this problem every day — and together they defined what a real solution had to do. Six criteria, agreed by the people who would use it: safe, easy to use, adaptive to different wheelchairs and body sizes, high coverage, affordable, and locally available. Safety wasn’t just one item on the list; it was the filter everything else had to pass through first. And anything that took more than fifteen seconds to put on was, for a tired caregiver, effectively useless.

Everyone in those sessions made a card like this one — a “How might we” card, with a user, a goal, and a pain point. This was Saad’s: “How might we help Mr Tan & Mdm Lee re-use the rain covering for their other wheelchair without having to assemble/dismantle anything?” — with his collaborators notes underneath: quick release but secure, conserve energy, less bits & bobs to deal with. A small card, but it holds the whole design brief: the covering has to move between wheelchairs, and it has to do it without eating a tired caregiver’s energy.

Saad’s card from the workshop — the other participants made similar cards of their own. Image: Saad Chinoy for 55 Minutes x SalvageGarden collaboration.

The brainstorm sheets from those sessions are a joy to look at — practical ideas sitting next to wild ones: a magnet closure, a press-and-expand frame, a tray basket, a hands-free phone holder, an LED light strip, glow-in-the-dark — and, alongside them, bats’ wings, dinosaurs, a pelican, aerogel duck feathers. Nothing was too silly to sketch, and the silly ones kept the room loose enough for the good ones to surface.

A brainstorm sheet from the sessions — magnet closures and LED light strips next to bats’ wings and aerogel duck feathers. Image: Saad Chinoy for 55 Minutes x SalvageGarden collaboration.

Saad facilitated several of the prototyping sessions at MakeIT @ Punggol — Level 4 of Punggol Regional Library, where our assistive technology makerspace lives — and there the ideas turned physical fast: a canopy held together with paper and plastic straws, tested for size and coverage on a real wheelchair; a skeleton borrowed from a baby stroller cover; a raincoat prototype tested with a real user and her caregiver, to see how easy it was to put on and adjust. Some ideas didn’t survive contact with reality — a canopy that looked right on paper turned out to be really hard to install with one hand, and a fabric we liked trapped moisture underneath. Each time, the team went back to the drawing board and asked: does this actually meet the criteria? When the answer was no, they started over.

A prototyping session at MakeIT @ Punggol — the fabric being held up here is an early poncho prototype, tried for size and coverage.

A prototyping session at MakeIT @ Punggol — the fabric being held up here is an early poncho prototype, tried for size and coverage. Image: 55 Minutes x SalvageGarden collaboration.

Trying on an early mesh canopy

Trying on an early mesh canopy — the self-expanding ribs idea, worn to see how it felt before it became the poncho’s frame. Image: 55 Minutes x SalvageGarden collaboration.

That is the part we’re proudest of, honestly. The designers have said it themselves: their job was to create the conditions for the right ideas to come out, which meant listening a lot more than talking. The better ideas often came from the caregivers in the room.

What they made

The result is the Wheelchair Poncho: a poncho that deploys in under 30 seconds, using flexible self-expanding ribs inspired by stroller mosquito nets and outdoor equipment. Magnetic closures and adjustable draw cords give a secure, comfortable fit for different users and wheelchairs, and the breathable nylon rip-stop fabric keeps heat down and dries quickly in our humidity. It packs down light and small into a bag, so it can be there when the rain comes without warning — which, in Singapore, is most of the time.

And then, the awards

In August 2026, the poncho won the Human-Centered Design Award at the 5th Asia Conference of Ergonomics & Design in Singapore. Then in October, it won a Red Dot Award: Design Concept 2026 — one of the world’s largest design competitions, and a list the Business Times called designs that “deserve to be produced — pronto”.

We want to be clear about what won. The awards went to the 55 Minutes team and their design — and they belong just as much to the people who shaped it: Francis, Brenda, Carol and Annie, who gave their time, shared their experiences, and helped shape every iteration. This is what happens when you design with people, not for them. A volunteer’s cable-tie hack, a room full of caregivers who know exactly what doesn’t work, a makerspace full of cardboard and tape — and a poncho that keeps someone dry.

Congratulations to the 55 Minutes team — Adeline Kuswanto, Pradnya Nirgun, Wendy Wong, Lynn Wee, Elena Lin and Mai Tatoy — and thank you to our volunteers and co-creators who made it real.

If you’d like to go deeper, the 55 Minutes team wrote beautifully about the process: Adeline, their design lead, on what a digital designer learns from making something physical, and Pradnya on what co-designing taught her about accessibility. Their full report is there too, for anyone who wants to replicate the poncho. And if you have a problem like Francis’s — something you’ve been trying to crack for months — bring it to a Make Inclusive Tech Sunday. That’s where this one started: with a crutch, some cable ties, and a question.

Sources

Media references — the awards