All posts by Ummi Kaltsum

Simplicity at its best.

Week 2 Response: Calibrating Your Cultural Compass

An extract from the chapter:

“When you want to know how and why people do the things they do, the best people to learn from are the doers themselves, and the best place to learn is where the doing gets done. This is the simple premise of design research.”

It is common for people/designers who are doing research to find the information and understanding of a situation online through social media etc. However, Chipchase’s way of design research is more towards first hand experience and observation by going through the daily routine of the users in order to understand why these doers do the things they do.

“Rapid Cultural Calibration” technique

As stated in the chapter, the technique can help deepen our understanding of a new culture and compare it with our own and others we’ve visited.

An observation that I had when I was in Seoul recently:

In the morning, locals were seen to be dashing across the road to catch the green man from a distance (at first I thought they were running towards the bus, but they dash across the road instead), heading towards the nearby subway station. While here in Singapore, locals were seen to be “enjoying their morning walk” to the MRT station nearby.

Another cultural observation was the subway train in Seoul — the local’s behaviours towards the reserved seats. The seats at both ends of each cabin was strictly reserved for senior citizens. It was a rare sight to see youngsters or non senior citizens in that seat. Not only the reserved seats, but locals usually allows the elders to have their seat. Comparing to Singapore, the reserved seats were mostly occupied.

I like the idea of traveling around the cities you visit to observe and understand the actions and behaviour of people. It gives the designers more insights and ideas to the next product they would make with relation to the cultural needs/behaviours.

Questions:

  1. The conclusion of “great design research is by finding the right balance between formal and informal data collection.” Would doing only online research be considered as an imbalance?
  2. How much information/observations does one have to collect before proceeding to the next design phase?

Week 1 Response: The Design of Everyday Things, Chapter 1

Chapter 1 mostly touch on the important characteristics of good design: discoverability and understanding. Throughout the chapter, I agree that designers should not only focus on making a product that works however they should also take into consideration of understanding the user’s interaction with the product itself. It would not be much of a success if the product sells well, works well, but it does not meet the needs of the human, their capabilities and behavior. In my opinion, designers hold the responsibility of fully understanding the behavior and the needs of users, then design
the everyday products based on what they have discovered.

Chapter 1 has several points that made me wonder about the products/designs that I have seen or came across these recent days/months. For example, learning about the Norman door made me think about how sliding doors, now, are designed to be opened using technology. At one point of time, users were not even aware that the doors leading to a shop were operated by push/press button thus getting pushed by the oncoming door.

Automated vs manual
(https://50daysux.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/day18-doors3.jpeg)

With relation to doors, how reliable is using technology in an everyday location? Perhaps, should the design of the button component be on the eye-level?

Trip down to Harvey Norman

During the Harvey Norman’s field trip, there were 2 products that has the same emotion and interesting factor, as well as products in similar trends.

Firstly,

The 2 products with same emotion, same interesting factor:

Panasonic steam iron

Morphy Richards steam iron

 

In terms of emotion:

  • Both products are designed in a streamlined shape with multiple functions installed on the steam iron. As a user, I think having multiple functions makes me feel that the product brings efficiency to the user to complete as much ironing as possible.  

In terms of interesting factor:

  • Panasonic steam iron has a steep convex shape towards the tip of the iron base while Morphy Richards’ has a hump-like shape towards the tip of the iron base.
  • Panasonic steam iron bottom part of the body, designed looking like a 3-legged rocket,  plays more with negative space to stabilize the entire form. With the negative space, the iron looks rather lightweight as compared to a heavy-looking Morphy Richards’, where the bottom part of the body is solid.

Secondly,

The products that were similar in trend:

LG (bottle-like) speaker

SMEG Electric Kettle

SMEG Toaster

Delonghi Toaster

In terms of similar trend:

  • I find that the products used colours that attracts user’s attention from afar. The cool pastel colours of LG and SMEG products were approachable and allowed the users to want to take a closer look.
  • Delonghi toaster on the other hand was the next product that caught my attention after the pastel-coloured products. The range of colours gave me the feeling of nostalgia and retro.
  • Similarities between the SMEG and Delonghi toaster showed another trend of having small, thin and sleek rounded knobs.

Motorola Cordless Handset

LG Speaker

In terms of similar trend:

  • Aesthetic and form of both product are designed in consideration of the human factor/ergonomics, where user’s hand fits nicely around the inward curvature of the product.

 

Factors of product aesthetics.

From the previous in-class lecture, we’ve touched on how 3 factors are influences of producing products’ aesthetics and/or form: function, human factor, and emotion.

Below, you can find my thoughts on the different products that is dominant in function, human factor, and emotion, respectively.

Function-dominant 

Product: Bow-tie candleholder

Designer: Vladimir Ivanov

Functional design are meant to be easily understood when the product is used.

The bow-tie candle holder designed by Vladimir Ivanov is minimal in terms of shape and details thus it is a straightforward product. The wood is most likely done by wood turning, where the diameter of the base is sufficient to stabilize the weight as well as height when the candle is placed in the required hole in the middle of the top plane. 

Human Factor-dominant

Product name: Knelt Desk

Designer: Tim Spencer, Ubiquity Design Studio

Problem: Through research, it was observed that children have the tendency to hunch over their flat desk while they kneel. Hunching over can lead to bad posture due to the stress on the spinal cord.

Solution: With the users being children from the age range of 3 – 10, the designer designed the Knelt Desk to educate the children of the proper sitting posture. Comparing the proportion of the desk and the seat, the desk is at least twice the height. They designed both the desk and seat at an elevated angle so that the user could experience the comfortable sitting position thus taking away with them the knowledge of correct sitting posture as they grow.

Source: http://ubiquitydesignstudio.blogspot.sg/

Emotion-dominant

 

Product: CampTeck BPA-free Water Bottle

Before BPA-free water bottles were designed, plastic water bottles were everybody’s best friend. Although plastic are known to be non-biodegradable, research proved that it is harmful towards human health.

Plastic bottles contained a compound called bisphenol A — BPA for short. Reports stated that BPA is harmful towards human health system as excessive BPA in our body can lead to cancer, etc. Therefore, like the campaign of “No Plastic Bottles” campaign ran by ADM, encourage consumers/users to use BPA-free water bottles instead, preventing more harm to human health, as well as harming aquatic lives where plastics can be disposed.

I think this product is emotion-dominant because:

  • makes the user feel safer than drinking from plastic water bottles.
  • reminds the users to try their best to reduce the use of plastic bottles
  • users can carry out a healthier daily drink choice as fruit infuser was also incorporated in the design.

Naoto Fukasama

Among the designers we have been introduced in class, I would say that I can relate to Fukasawa’s design philosophy of simplicity. He also has the philosophy of  “Objective Thinking”, where he stated that we should not express our own mind through the product.

I think Fukasawa best describes how I work to produce my designs. Simple designs attract me the most because of its clean and sleek look. Fukasawa’s household appliances he designed for Muji shows minimalism in terms of functions, detailing and simple shapes.

Fukasawa designed these household appliances for Muji such as the hot water kettle, toaster and rice cooker.

Process: Final editing of pattern

Follow up from the first testing on Media Wall, we had another testing as well as photoshoot for our poster.

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After reviewing, another round of editing had to be done to make the piece look better, and not too clashing.

Below are the updated and final version of the still images of Mutation, follow up from the previous posts.

mutation-final-still-01-small

  1. A subtle background included to create texture, using one of the cells obtained during my visit to EMB for research.

mutation-final-still-02-small

2. The patterns are edited to be more spherical or rounder compared to the previous ones which are more elliptical.

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3. The size of the virus(es) are bigger to break the red.

MUTATION FINAL

4. The colour scheme for the virus(es) were chosen for contrast. The tone for the yellow used for the bigger virus is reduced so that it doesn’t clash with the red as red is supposed to be the center of attraction.

Test on Media Wall

Here are the images captured during the still image test on the media wall:

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img_1878

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With the test, I managed to see the scale and proportion of the still images. However, with the white gap between the top panel and the background, there is a need to increase the size slightly more than the size of the panel itself.

Additionally, the background looked rather flat and plain thus I thought of adding texture. Probably will make use of the slideshows I have collected during the visit to the Medicine Lab.