As part of a project for the TU Delft and together with my good friends Job Greefhorst and Amine Rhord, we set out to design the books and libraries of the future. We followed some context mapping techniques to understand the domain of reading in general as a first step for our process. I will explain the process in a later post, as it was quite interesting and it will give me a chance to explain some of these context mapping techniques in greater detail, but in the mean time, I’ll just stick to the results of our research which are more than plenty for a single post, and of course I will show you one of the two concepts that we came up with (the other one will also come on a later post).
So let’s get started…
THE READING DOMAIN CONTEXT
We wanted to know what people thought of their books, how they stored them, why they liked them, why they (more…)
I’ve talked before about the Virtual Goals project that I worked on a few months back, and in this post I’d like to talk a bit more about one of the techniques that we used during the project: Wizard of Oz prototyping
This technique (named of course after the famous book by L. Frank Baum) is in my opinion one of the most powerful ways of experimenting and developing user interfaces dealing with smart systems, because it allows you to test even when there is no smart system to start with!
The idea is fairly simple: you make a prototype in which all of the actions which will eventually be attributed to the computer system are actually performed by a person.
Let’s illustrate with an example; let’s say you want to make a system that recognizes (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.
I came across this video the other day, and thought that it would be interesting to publish it here too. It’s a look at Bogota (Colombia), my home town, and it’s current developments from a sustainability perspective.
The video itself is quite interesting and it portrays the work done on the city during the past decade and how it is meant to boost Bogota towards a more sustainable future. Having experienced the city and the new infrastructure first hand, I can honestly say that the video is a bit idealized, and that not everything is as pretty (more…)
I came across this TED Talk today by Malcom Gladwell called “What we can learn from spagetti sauce”, which I thought was wonderful and I wanted to post it here. Basically, it illustrates why there is no single über-product which will make all of your users happy. People are diverse by nature, so why would one single type of product match them all?
It also reminded me that some time ago during a marketing course I followed for my bachelor, I had to read this fantastic article by Anthony W. Ulwick called “Turn customer input into innovation” (I know, I know, not the most creative of titles, but a good one nonetheless), and I’ve been wanting to share (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…)
Football, interactive technology, prototyping, user testing, wizard of oz.
Design Goal:
At playgrounds, the sport courts are very popular and are used intensively for playing football. It is however strange that these sport courts are hardly used by girls, despite the strong growth in the popularity of girl football in the last few years. Our design goal was to develop an interactive installation for sport courts and in particular the Cruyff courts. By adding interactive technology to the game of football we want to enhance the playability of the playgrounds.
Project duration and team:
120 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Nouschka Tijdeman, Ferdinand van Oostrom)
Reading, books, future scenario, conceptual design, context research
Design Goal:
As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft we were asked to research the domain of books and libraries and to propose a concept design of how these would be like in a future scenario. The focus was laid on the concept and interactions rather than on technical details of the products.
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.
For our Interactive Technology Design (ITD) course as part of my Design for Interaction master (TU Delft), we were asked to work on introducing interactive technology into the Cruyff Courts (free access outdoor football fields throughout the Netherlands) so that we could enhance their playability and attractiveness, with an specific emphasis on integrating more girls into the fields, as it was found that they were not making much use of the courts even though they like the game and girl-football is on the rise.
We came up with the concept of “Virtual Goals”, which consists of replacing the normal goals and nets we have today by two large surface areas on each side of the field, in which different types of goals will be displayed according to (more…)
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…)
As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft, we were given the task to use a 1928 patent of a cream whipper as a starting point for our design case. We were to use the patent as much as we could and translate the design of the cream whipper into our days in terms of production, assembly, materials, styling and features.
Project duration and team:
250 hours, 6 industrial design engineers (David Güiza Caicedo, Wouter Drost, Roos van Rhijn, Erik Jansen, Marie-Louise Brantjes)
I'm an industrial designer with a focus on interaction within product design, and this blog is my place to try and share some of the things I know about and discuss those I would like to know more about.
This website works as a platform to share my experience with some design methodologies & tools, to discuss design related issues and to showcase some of the projects I've worked on.
You can learn a bit more about me by clicking the link underneath.
I assume that everybody at the TU Delft heard from the presentation that Bill Baxton (Principal researcher Microsoft – 
