For my first post of the year I received the inspiration from a Christmas present my sister received while I was visiting her.
I’ve always had the habit of keeping the little styrofoam packing peanuts of any package I receive so that I can reuse them whenever I have to send something out myself. It saves me money and I ensure that the material is used at least once more. Sadly though, I’m sure that this is not something that everybody does and undoubtedly most of these peanuts end up in the trash after a single use, contributing to our waste problems.
But what’s the alternative? Well, as I mentioned, my sister received this gift during the holidays which I thought was brilliantly simple and a very nicely thought alternative. It was a little box with shower and bath soaps which used POPCORN (!!!) instead of styrofoam. (more…)
Last Friday (Sept. 25th), I attended the Symposium Advanced Automotive Design organized at the TU Delft as part of the celebrations of the 40th anniversary of the Industrial Design Faculty. It was a very nice event in which top designers from the automotive industry (all of them TU Delft alumni) shared a bit of their work and experience as designers for these well known firms as well as giving us their view of the future of automotive design.
The keynote speakers were Fedde Talsma (Exterior Chief Designer at Volvo), Adrian van Hooydonk (Design Director at BMW) and Lowie Vermeersch (Design Director at Pininfarina) who were asked to choose a fragment of a movie as introduction to their talk. We also enjoyed shorter presentations by other TU Delft designers working for Ducati, Alfa-Romeo, DAF, Mercedes and Audi. (more…)
So… it’s been a little over a week since I did the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project (Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services), and since I went off on a short one week vacation right after that, I didn’t have the time to post the video and some photos of the presentation during that time.
But as I promised some people, today I finally got back and had some spare time to upload everything. So above,you can take a look at the video of the presentation (takes about 45 minutes including the questions round). The file is quite big (around 500 Mb) because I couldn’t (more…)
I’ve been quite busy the last few weeks working on my MSc. graduation project, and so I haven’t had much time to do any new updates here, but since a while ago I found out that one of the projects I worked on had been published on the website of the European Commission for Transport, I figured that was worth a mention.
As I’ve showed in previous posts, I worked together with a group of colleagues in a project developing a new concept for delivery trucks of the future. My posts were focusing mainly on the application of the Vision in Product Design approach (ViP), which was just but a part of the project.
Later in the process, this vision and future product which we had designed was translated into a product that could be introduced to the market in the near future and it had a strong relation to the Civitas initiative sponsored by the European Union (more…)
Here’s the sixth and final post of the ongoing series explaining the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process. It includes some very nice illustrations of the delivery truck we designed for the future.
PART 6:
DESIGNING - THE PRODUCT LEVEL
Once you reach the product level once again, you use the information from all the previous phases of ViP, specially the vision which you created, and the interaction qualities you intend to have with your product, and you finally start designing the product (or service) itself.
This is probably the phase of the process which will be closest to home to designers, as here’s where you start giving shape to the cloud of ideas that have been generated so far, and you finally (more…)
Some one sent me a link to this very beautiful short movie, which shows some awesome holographic interfaces, and I just had to share it here. Not much more to say, but WATCH IT! it will certainly be worth the 9 minutes of your time.
With my MSc. graduation project now in full swing, I havent had much time to dedicate to posting things, but I figured that this could be a nice way of clearing my mind, so today I’ll continue with the ongoing series of posts explaining the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process.
PART 5:
DESIGNING - THE INTERACTION LEVEL
By following the ViP methodology, the next step in our process was to think about the interaction level in the future context. In this new step the idea is to identify a number of interaction qualities which are relevant in our attempt to achieve the vision that we conceived in the previous phase, but without thinking of any particular product yet.
These qualities of interaction will be of great importance for the (more…)
Combigroep Carrosserieën, a Dutch coachworks producer, wants to extend its potential market following the newest regulations, transportation trends and logistics of the European Union having sustainability as a focus. As a group of 6 interdisciplinary designers the project was carried out from the strategy up to the product interaction and product detail level.
Project duration and team:
300 hours, 2 Strategic product designers (Stefanus Heru Prabowo, Ricardo Mejia), 3 Integral product designers (Barth Vrijling, Ana Laura Rodrigues Santos, Marjolein van Houten), 1 Interaction designer (David Güiza Caicedo).
The context of the industry and our clients position within it was researched and analyzed through stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis and PESTE analysis
Interviews and role playing user analysis were used to understand our users and personas were used to illustrate them during the design process.
Generated future scenarios
Creative sessions were performed to generate ideas during the design process.
Today is freezing outside and there isn’t the slightest chance that I’m going out there… so in the meantime I figured I can continue with the Vision in Product Design (ViP) example I’ve been writing about lately.
This is quite a lenghty post, so let’s just jump straight to the point.
PART 4:
DESIGNING - THE CONTEXT LEVEL
At this point, we’ve already reached the designing phase of the process, and we start by defining the future context.
DRIVING FACTORS FOR THE FUTURE
Within the VIP process the use of factors is intended to assist the deconstruction of the present world context in order to map probable and predictable features/aspects on a projected future.
Factors can be divided in four distinctive (more…)
The aim of deconstruction at the context level is to try and think about what factors in the original conditions that a product was created for provided a possible reason to produce that particular person product interaction. (Lloyd, Hekker, & van Dijk, 2006) One of the most important parts of this deconstruction consists in the “context analysis” that provides key information to understand the system and the product itself.
When designers are developing products that function in complex situations, they (more…)
In a previous post I discussed the very first step of the Vision in Product Design (ViP) process, the deconstruction at a product level. On this post, I’ll be showing examples of the next step, deconstruction at an interaction level, and how we handled it in our project to design the delivery of the future. If you havent read it, I suggest you read that one before diving into this one.
But if you’ve already read it… let’s jump right to it!
PART 2: DECONSTRUCTION – THE INTERACTION LEVEL
The interaction qualities characterizing the relationship between the Combis and the different users involved with it was analysed though a brainstorming session where the team reflected, with a play role technique, the qualities which can be perceived from the interaction of these (more…)
Prototyping is an iterative process that allows you to test, evaluate and implement changes to your design during the developing process before arriving to a final solution, and experiential prototyping is no exception to this. The designer is thus encouraged to produce and test prototypes along the whole development process. But since prototyping can be very effort and time consuming, it is important to know what type of prototyping techniques are more appropiate at different stages.
The concept of prototype “fidelity” is defined by the level of detail used in making it, and dus how closely does the prototype resembles the “real thing”. For example, in software and graphical user interface design, low-fi prototyping can be achieved with simple tools such as paper and colored pencils, with which a quick and dirty sketch of an interface can be drawn on different sheets of paper and be tested (and most importantly fixed) on the run before any code is written at all, and it allows people from other disciplines to be able to collaborate.
low fidelity prototyping also adds the extra advantage of a quick and unfinished “look”, which will (more…)
In a previous post I talked about the Vision in Product Design approach, explaining what it was about and the benefits of it.
Since then, I’ve been applying it in a couple of projects I’m currently working on, and I found that the trickiest thing of this approach is to know exactly what it is that you are looking for with it and how to keep in track. So in this train of thought, I figured that it would be interesting and helpful for people not familiarized with ViP to go through each of the phases of the approach while having a concrete example of what should be done and what kind of results to expect from each phase of the design process.
So as an example, I’ll be using the process that me and my team have gone trough during our Integral Design Project, which is a second year master’s course at the TU Delft involving team members from the 3 master directions (Strategic product design, Design for Interacion and Integral Product Design) working together on a project.
In our case, our goal was to develop a new, more sustainable product for a producer of truck coachworks (known in Dutch as Combi’s), focusing on their current products for “delivery and distribution”. (more…)
The goal of this project was to evaluate the usability of the Alcatel-Lucent IP Touch 4018 office phone and to propose a re-design of the phone according to the findings of the performed tests. The team consisted of 6 Design for Interaction master students of the TU Delft working directly for Alcatel-Lucent, a global telecommunications corporation.
I assume that everybody at the TU Delft heard from the presentation that Bill Baxton (Principal researcher Microsoft – http://www.billbuxton.com) has done on monday (nov 19) at the Industrial Design faculty, entitled “Product Design by sketching user experience”.
For those of you who missed this very interesting lecture, I recorded it and placed it on the internet for you guys to watch. Video quality is not optimal, but it’s more about the story being told than anything else, so for that goal it’s good enough.
Click on the READ MORE link beneath to see the video. (more…)
I'm an industrial designer with a focus on people-product interaction... just trying to share some of the things I know about (and those I would like to know more about).
This website works both as a blog to share my experience with some design methodologies / tools, and as a showcase for some of the projects I've worked on.
You can see an overview of my design portfolio by clicking the link underneath.
I assume that everybody at the TU Delft heard from the presentation that Bill Baxton (Principal researcher Microsoft – 
