Design Electives
Lifestyle Design, Fall 2021
PFL Magazine
Designing Products for a Group with Shared Lifestyle
Introductory video summarizing the lifestyle with snippets of interviews with fighters.
Over 2 months, we researched different aspects of the professional fighters' lifestyle to design products that fit into their lives.
The final report comes in the form of a magazine made in the fighters' style. We interviewed fighters in the Netherlands to gain insights into their preferences, values and rituals. This magazine covers some interviews, clothing, objects and issues of significance for the fighters.
Selection of potential product concepts
Design for Children's Play, Fall 2021
Dino Run
Facilitating Play Amongst Different Personality Types
Dino Run is a set of toys that facilitate a game children can play in groups of 2.
The target group of our design are children from 5-7 years old, to play during recess, in a schoolyard. Location was selected for more introverted children to have a chance to observe the play and join to their comfort.
Story
Children are a team of explorers in the depths of a jungle no one has gone before, where they are chased by a dinosaur. The groups must cross a large river using the items they find around to build a path in the water.
Objective
Children form teams of two with roles of builders and crossers. Teams race against each other to reach the finish line first. For children who enter the game midway or do not want to be in a team, the group can come up with roles to pose extra challenges or give advantages to the teams. The reverse block enables children to switch the finish line and starting point, which means both teams have to turn around and suddenly another team is in front. This strategic element should cause a rich experience for the children.
The essence of the game, the core playful experience we want children to have, is the strategic element caused by the ‘reverse’ shape. The play for the team that has the ‘reverse’ pillow will be inherently different from the experience for the team that does not have one. If both teams have the reverse pillow, this will also affect the play in a different way.
Design for Emotion, Fall 2021
Equitable Serveware
Using Emotions for Dilemma Driven Design
"I want my guests to feel equally valued but unique and important at the same time"
The design exposes a dilemma many people experience in hosting guests for dinner: making everyone at the table feel valued, but one guest always must be served first.
Due to its irregular shape, when placed on the table the serving bowl decides who gets served first by tipping over in an unpredictable direction. This takes away the meaning of getting served first as the host no longer makes the decision.
The concept comes from a process of identifying conflicting motives people experience around an activity, in this case, cooking.
Emotions come from the appraisal of a stimulus based on the context of the event and the person experiencing them. They inform us on how things can affect our wellbeing.
This emotion based design process starts with recording micro emotions experienced while cooking and the event stimulating them.
Later, laddering technique is utilized to reach a core internal thought that motivates this emotion.
To come up with more universal motives a lot of people share, results from individual studies are analyzed and clustered into groups. Conflicting statements here inform the dilemmas that have informed our design process.