The first hunch: making a smaller pram

Babies are small, so why are prams so big?

The initial motivation for designing a new pram was to solve my personal pain points as a non-parent and non-pram owner.

I’ve never seen a pram board and alight a bus or tram in an elegant way. It is always at least a two person job — one person on the bus crouching down holding the back handle of the pram, and the other person carrying the front wheel-base hoping to negotiate a safe landing on the tarmac. Even when on the bus, prams take us space. In fact, prams tend to take up a similar amount of space as wheelchairs; obscene given the size disparity of their payloads.

If prams were smaller, this would be less painful for parents, as well as passengers that have to share the bus with this space-consuming object.

What will it take to minimise the footprint of a pram, taking up less space on vehicles, and making it easier to move and stow. The primary question is that babies are small, so why are prams so big?

The primary driver of a pram’s size is the width of the wheelbase. The length of the wheelbase impacts the stability of pram. A pram with a shorter wheelbase will have the impact of feeling less stable, which is a mostly unacceptable compromise amongst a highly safety-conscious target market.

Shortening this impacts the stability of the pram, particularly if the pram is taller and/or if the baby is positioned higher up to be closer to the parent. (iCandy Peach pram pictured).

But what if the wheelbase length could be shortened by lowering the pram’s centre of gravity. Most prams have a relatively high centre of gravity due to the desire to have the baby elevated from the ground and closer to the parent. There are many practical benefits of having the baby higher up in the pram:

• it enhances connection between baby and parent as they are closer,

• it protects the baby from the elements (dirt, dust, pollution, dogs etc.)

• the baby is easier to tend to,

• and conveniently, it leaves space for a storage compartment in the wheelbase.

I had initially explored the idea of lowering the baby on the pram to allow for a much slimmer wheelbase, which can be seen in these very rough initial sketches.

In this example, the baby bassinet is elevated off the ground only with the wheels. This means that the length of the wheelbase does not need to be any longer than the width of the bassinet itself to be stable.

The initial thinking was that the bassinet could still be lifted alongside the handle shaft to allow the baby to be elevated in a higher position or tended to. It could use some pneumatic mechanisms to make it easy to lift (like stand-up desks or height-adjustable office chairs). When the bassinet is lifted, and thus heightening the centre of gravity, the wheelbase could naturally expand to ensure continued stability.

Height-adjusting aside, the concept resembled the collapsible baby wagons that are often seen at beaches or holiday spots where baby movers are capable of holding multiple infants and can handle different terrain.

Baby wagons which can be collapsed flat and can also hold multiple children at once.

The concept of having the baby positioned lower becomes a lot more interesting when the seat’s horizontal footprint isn’t quite so long. With a baby bassinet where the baby lies flat (usually required for newborns), the horizontal footprint is necessarily lengthy. But when a baby is sitting upright in a more seated position, the horizontal footprint is much shorter. In this situation, having the wheelbase expand when the baby seat is lifted up the shaft makes a lot of sense and materially improves the stability of the pram.

Wheelbase expanded

After discussing this with many parents however, having a baby positioned lower makes it feel significantly less safe, which is an unacceptable compromise. When the baby is low to the ground, they are exposed to the dirt and pollution of the pavement, and car exhaust, it leaves them susceptible to being trampled on and attacked by misbehaving dogs.

Aside from the safety concerns, prams are a vehicle for babies to learn about the world around them and exercise their curiosity. The world is much more interesting to look at from a higher vantage point, rather than simply looking at the legs of passers-by. This would undoubtedly impact the child’s development.

A low-seated design also has architectural and mechanical issues. The problem is that the flat wheelbase is dictated by the type of seat that is in use. If a bassinet is in use then the wheelbase needs to be longer. If a seat is in the use, then the wheelbase can shorter. Since the wheelbase length is dictated by the bassinet, it does not leave a lot of opportunity for more modular iterations such as swapping the bassinet for a toddler seat for instance. Additionally, the above designs leave few accomodations for different positions: lying flat, upright etc.

With a lot of prams in the market currently, the length of the wheelbase is often shorter than the bassinet, meaning the above designs can in some permutations, be materially worse than what’s available currently.

Originally published on Medium on February 11, 2023.