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
Dinorun
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.
2.009: Product Engineering Process, Academic Fall 2018
Interactive Speed Bump
A speed regulation device to collapse flat for emergency vehicles.
Worked in a team of 20 people to carry out a product from ideation to alpha prototype for the senior capstone class.
An important consideration for our target market, municipalities, is the road excavation required for installation. We determined the footprint of our product based on the common excavation vehicles and dimensions.
Initial life-sized prototype of RSB. Tested outside using cars to build our final product.
Exploded view of the product assembly.
Final product. The speed bump enclosure and the interactive road sign.
Toy Product Design, Spring 2016
Infect It
Health-themed board game aimed for children & parents.
Worked in a team of 6 to design a toy in one semester. Tested sketch models, mockups and prototypes with children in Boston Children's Museum.
Players choose a disease character that is one of virus, tumor or bacteria and race against other diseases to have the most infected areas before the body shuts down.
My goal with this toy was to create a communication platform between young children and parents to talk about sickness, an often hard subject to talk about. The game is more targeted towards children who have a sick person around them, for the child to gain some understanding of what is going on.
Organs are the real estate in this game. I sculpted stylized organs and cast them out of silicone to give an eerie, tissue-like texture.
Final presentation
Silicone organs with their female molds
Chibitronics
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Summer 2016
Code Collage
Tangible Programming On Paper With Circuit Stickers
Collaborated with Jie Qi to develop code stickers, programming construction kit that blends the functionality of programming with the materiality of paper craft. The kit is made of circuit sticker electronic modules with inputs and outputs that are connected together with conductive tapes to create computational systems. Co-authored Code Collage: Tangible Programming on Paper with Code Stickers with Jie Qi. In Proceedings
of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Example code collage of city skyline that glows when the sun is blocked
Code Collage modules: light sensor (upper left), voltage divider/tuner (lower left), record/playback module (upper right), compare (lower right).
Undergraduate Research Assistant, Summer 2016
Paper Electronics
Research and exploration of Chibitronics Circuit Stickers applications
Made a sketchbook with circuit stickers to explore the range in interactivity electronics add to visual art. These works bring together a little bit of coding, drawing, scrapping and lots of copper tape to create unusual paper artwork.
Sketch 2: An aquatic themed mandala. The light patterns are triggered by a sound sensor that also responds to tapping. Underling circuit pictured on the right.