Alex Studying Industrial Design @alexstudyingindustrialdesign - Tumblr Blog

Jonas Ekholst - Yuppieblaster

Nice design

Imagine being able to unfurl a huge tent that immediately pitched itself from a small bag. That’s what this material could provide, according to a a team of researchers from Harvard.

interesting

takeovertime

BOTT XC1 | Bottpower

A futuristic variation of the cafe racer inspired by the Buell Lightning Long. It has defined lines and simple tones to make this an elegant powerful machine.

alexstudyingindustrialdesign

Beautiful. Not directly relevant.

Blue Jay

Because of my great interest in discovering and integrating drone technology into our lives and because I am interested to meet more students from other disciplines I joined the Blue Jay student team this week as an interaction designer.

Blue Jay has the goal to develop a drone that understands you and helps you with daily tasks. The drone wil be safe and will operate completely autonomously. I am super excited to be part of the team and I hope to discover how I, as an interaction designer, can contribute to the team and ultimately to something that everyone might have flying around in their living room soon ;)

#interaction interface inspiration

I found this video in a Pinterest Board I had made a year ago to collect interesting interface inspiration. I especially like the how the opening of the speaker itself is designed in this video.

Small Ethnographic Research

Since I believe good design is made in context with it’s users I set out to discover how everyday products, practices and relations influence peoples lives by observing and interviewing people of different age categories in their homely environments.

Before I started I talked to experts in ethnography. A coach from our design squat named Anika Hupfeld and an anthropology student named Lotje van den Dungen. From them I learned that within this kind of research it is extremely important to understand that, as an observer/ interviewer, you are always influencing the behavior of your subjects. Next to that I understood that within a timeframe of two weeks it is not possible to get useful information for my project by just observing and that it was inevitable that I would have to drive the conversations a bit more towards something directly useful for my design proces. Still to learn more from this experience and get out of my comfort zone I chose the first interview to be with people that didn’t know.

To respect the privacy of the people I interviewed, I will not go into the details of our conversations. Still there where some interesting findings that I will list below. (These “conclusions” are merely based on observations of just a few people and I know these findings might not be representative on average)

First of all, interviewing people within their homely environment that I had never talked to before was a very powerful experience. It proved to me that my way of thinking about other peoples behavior and thoughts is truly biased by common stereotypes.

Secondly, I had expected elderly to feel more attachment to their belongings than people of my generation because we grew up in more of a throw away society. It could be that I happened to have interviewed a group of modern people, but I noticed that there wasn’t much difference in affection for belongings between the age groups. The elderly I talked to cared as less about their stuff as people that I talked to in my age group.

Thirdly, the most important objects in the daily lives of the interviewed, were functional products that were used on a daily bases that helped them with their practices, like the stove to make food with to make beloved ones feel good. They were also products that aided them in performing their hobbies, like books with inspirational examples or musical instruments.

Moreover, I noticed people didn’t feel an urge towards creating a connected world around them. “why would you need a thermostat that automatically turns off when you go to bed? I can just do it myself.”

To add to that, some issues they had like forgetting where they had put important stuff like passports could be solved by products that are already on the market today like digital agendas and contact lists on smartphones and products like Tile, that help you locate important objects. The people just didn’t see the necessity to look for them, hadn’t heard or thought about them or found the threshold to implement it in their lives to much of a hassle.

#Elective: Designing For the Here & Now

During this elective, together with an awesome team, I will focus on creating artifacts that are interactive in an aesthetically pleasing way within the context of Telepresence.

We will focus on creating an irresistible interaction rather than a functional one. The method of learning by doing (prototyping) and reflecting on how people perceive the artifact will be the central in this course.

I am both interested in exploaring different interactions and defining further what and why these designed interactions are aesthetically pleasing as well as bringing the programming and electronics skills that I learned the last two years to practice by creating two or more artifacts connected through the internet to be interacted with on different locations at the same time.

#Defining Criteria

To be able to make decisions between different ideas and concepts to work out in my FBP (Final Bachelor Project) it is important to define some criteria based on my my vision on design and the goals I have for this semester.

Important elements that come forward from my vision that I want to implement In my FBP are:

Designing and testing in context.

Putting emphasis on multi-sensory and aesthetic interaction.

Making something that triggers emotions and let’s users reflect on life and their behavior.

Implementing the idea of creating a service instead of an individual product to contribute to a more sustainable future.

Other elements that I want to incorporate in my final project are:

Designing for competency development, by which I mean that people can become good at it (just like cooking and making music).

Designing for a large audience. Although It’s hard to do good quantitative research, the goal is to create something that can be enjoyed by different age groups and different living environments.

filesaveas

Paper Clip by Charles Riccardi

alexstudyingindustrialdesign

#inspiration

#inspiration End of Possession

In my last post I mentioned the questions:

"Why would I want to design something (a product) that becomes truly important to someone? "

"If new products become more advanced each year. Is it useful to create products with the intention of creating a ‘true long-lasting’ connection with its user?"

The Tegenlicht documentary 'The End of Possession' (of which a short version is shown below) provided a lot of useful input for me to create my own answer to these questions. Some interesting insights for me were:

There is apparently a successful business model that provides a more sustainable future of products and natural resources, where large companies stop selling single products (that are doomed to break) and start selling only a service.

If this is indeed a realistic future, people will not buy functional products anymore, but instead companies will provide people with the best products they have in order to fulfill this service and take them from you at the end of the contract time.

In this new economy people might be identified less through what products that have and more by who they are as a person.

Maybe I should focus more on providing a service to people in this project and design a sustainable plan and product(s) to deliver this service.

short version of the Tegenlicht episode

Important Products

During the first meeting with she Project Squad, we discussed why the most important products we had were meaningful to us to gain insight in different products create a complex set of relationships, connecting us to other people, things, places, and times.

In the end the following important relations with objects were suggested:

change habits / serendipitous (discovered by chance in a happy/beneficial way) / use / daily use / non-use / functionality / on the body / distributed meaning (thing/owner/other) / meaning grows/changes over time / evidence / memories / people / aspirations ((a goal that is) strongly desired) / evolving use / wearing of the material / aging of the material / material durability / identity / places / (physical) uniqueness

After the discussion one discovery that struck me was that a lot of people (including myself) had difficulties selecting 3 ‘things’ to bring to the meeting. Not because they had too manny, but rather too little items that were really important to them. This brought me to the following questions:

If it is more about the personal meaning people give to products, than about the functionality it has, is it actually possible to design a product in a way that it become of such importance to people?

Are we living in an age where our connection with the products we have becomes of less importance? How was it 50 years ago?

Why would I want to design something that becomes truly important to someone?

If new products become more advanced each year. Is it useful to create products with the intention of creating a ‘true long-lasting’ connection with its user?

Image of the stuff students brought with them.

#FinalBachelorProject

Hi,

After successfully finishing my internship at Tellart, it is time to start my last semester as an Industrial Design bachelor.

Within the theme of Connected Everyday Things (mainly focussed on the internet of things movement) I will be examining the relations of everyday things to people, environments and other artifacts in an era of connectedness.

There are some very interesting design challenges to address in this area like:

What can connected everyday things be?

How can new things create meaningful futures by connecting to the old products and current practices of people?

How can people use design and aesthetics to create sustainable and meaningful relations with and between connected things?

Why should digital things be connect with the analogue experiences of human beings?

Looking forward to start putting the vision, knowledge and skills I built up over the course of my study to practice and create something meaningful and beautiful.

A beautiful video I found on Pinterest about IoT products.

#project: User Test 1.0

Yesterday I found 2 persons to try and play my game. It was still a paper prototype and I used the Wizard Of Oz experiment technique, where I performed the actions that the computer would do in the (real) digital game. Results were interesting but promising.

I got some great insights during the test. By actually stepping into the role of the computer, I found out that there were still some gaps in the concept concerning the details and the sequence of different actions.

One of the participants, who studies cultural anthropology gave me helpful advice about the negative influence the game might have on players. Although the idea of the concept is to show the compliance of human rights all over the world, a possible side effect could be to enhance negative stereotyping of the inhabitants of specific countries, which is not my goal at all. The way I will resolve this issue is to mention the actual goal of the game after playing, to show my concerns and to warn for stereotyping.

Other insights came after discovering that if a player was lucky to survive a few rounds after another, nothing exciting happened, which made the game a bit (but only a ‘tiny bit’) boring. For further development, I wil have to find more scenarios for the player that provoke a rich animation. Next to that I will think about making cool animations for situations in which a character survives a round as a reward for the player.

Moreover I have to think about how to reveil the countries, if a person is ‘game over’, especially about how to show which situations belonged to which countries.

(impression of one of the sessions of user testing)

#sideproject: university collaboration platform

During the assignment Designing Tangible Business Models, our team came with a few great concepts for the future of TU/e science park. One of them being an online platform for interfaculty collaboration of students researchers and high-tech companies. Since the concept was well received during our final presentation and because of personal interest for such a platform I decided to really get on with it and try to develop it further as an SDL (self directed learning) activity.

Gilles was one of the group mates who showed interest in working together and was at the same time available to work on it intensively. And so we started...

#assignment reflection

Expectations There were three reasons for me to start this assignment. The first being, the disappointing start of my Creative Apps assignment. The second being, the brief notion of my assessor to invest more time on my business competency. And the last, but most important reason: the persuasiveness of Camilla van der Boom, who unintentionally made me feel the urge to become a master of business during an extracurricular brainstorm session. I wanted to learn how to sell an idea, how to work with business models, I wanted to change my attitude to become more direct, honest and achievement oriented within my study environment, learn how to approach business from a design perspective, learn about networking and meet likeminded people to finally become a better designer.

Gains The assignment more than exceeded my expectations. As a self directed learner, I know that nowadays, it’s only a matter of a few clicks on the internet and the right equipment to start learning practically anything. But I think that there is actually one more thing required to start and keep on learning, which is motivation, a big hairy ambitious goal. That is what I am looking for. Somebody that can trigger me to go for that 10/10. Camilla did awake just that motivation in us. Combine that eagerness with an exceptional team of brothers and you get this:

I managed to reach all my learning objectives. I got a deeper insight in my personal strengths. I extended my network. I learned about the persuasive power of a tangible model to represent a thought or conceptual idea, by experiencing the impact first hand during our final presentation. Moreover the assignment showed me the value of applying a designers approach towards problem solving (design thinking) within other fields than just product/ interaction design. Because we actually went through a whole design process within 6 weeks, I did not only develop my business process competency further, but also Form&Senses through sketching and modeling, Design&Research proceses, Integrating Technology within our final model, User Focus through fitting our presentation to our audience, Ideas&concepts by creating a physical model from an idea, communication through our presentations and I definitely developed teamwork by bonding with the team.

Future I changed my attitude towards business and business men/women within this quartile and I am less afraid to present my bold ideas to people wearing suits or being older than me. Next quartile, I want to implement a business model into my personal project and apply the knowledge I gained directly. Moreover, during the assignment I worked out a structure for a new kind of system that could attract a lot of businesses to the university and stimulate the growth of startups. I would like to discuss the possible implementation of that idea with Camilla, to see if I can start working it out for real. Last but not least, I want took keep on developing my professional network, for which I made a start by showing interest in working together with Mimoun Oaissa (who was one of the jury members at our final presentation) next semester.

#assignment final model

Our final model fitted perfectly into our story about how we perceive the TU/e Sciencepark and what we think it should become in the future.

During the presentation the model was closed and looked like a big grey brick. In our vision, most students that study here and even researchers don’t really know what great things are happening around the TU/e. They go to their faculty building in the morning, they work and they leave. There is not enough communication between the students and researchers from different faculties and even within the same faculty it doesn’t happen enough. Moreover the integration of high tech businesses could be a lot better in our eyes.

Our plan was threefold and came down to 3 ideas that increased communication between all parties on Sciencepark and created a more inspiring and homely environment. This all to create a better startup atmosphere that could attract the best researchers, students, investors and high-tech companies to settle on campus and work together to push the boundaries of science and technology.

These 3 ideas were represented in a concrete and visible way. Each idea on a separate floor within the model. In the end of the presentation the model was closed again and turned around to visualize impact of the changes on the situation as it was before (the concrete brick look)

#assignment final presentation

Our hard work and preparation of every detail did pay off in the end. It was a crazy ride working on a project almost every day for 6 weeks, but it was definitely worth it!

The strategy we used to constantly keep the audience attention worked extremely well. We used stickers, live drawing, opening up the grey block (that represented our view of TU/e Sciencepark’s feeling) to reveal our interactive model with sounds, lighting and beautiful miniatures and we even used a magic trick, which made watching very enjoyable. The presentation went great and the official jury was very interested in our concepts. Especially in our view on the sequence of implementation and who would be responsible for to bring the concepts to life.

We got some great tips for further development of our pitching strategy, like elaborating on the historical context of the plan. Moreover we could have elaborated more on the urgency of the implementation. Not only showing the great opportunities, but also what we would be missing if we don’t implement them right away. Next to that a valuable tip from Mimoun Oaissa was to focus on one thing at the time when pitching. “If you show a beautiful model, Give the audience time to look at it before going on with talking.”

All in all, I am really glad to have met this team of likeminded students that were willing to go for that 9.5, to have learned to use a design process as a tool for generating business models, to generate a physical model from an abstract idea and to get more confidence in presenting to professional people.

(pitching with confidence!)

(Jury is listening carefully)

(Our final representation of the open structure we think the TU/e Sciencepark should implement in the future)

(#teamtestosterone)

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Alex Studying Industrial Design