Design Intervention
Finding an opportunity to innovate and design within an individual’s daily life.Project Brief:
For this project, my task was to interview and learn more about the daily life of my peer, Lauren. I needed to use the data gathered through interviews and conversation to identify some pain points or areas of their daily life that could be improved or innovated upon.
Process & Challenges
After interviewing Lauren about hobbies, dislikes, likes, and daily routine, I collected some images provided by Lauren to put together a rough Visual Map of their day.
Further identifying 3 key words from the interviews, I also created some word association maps to help me brainstorm and find places I felt would be a good direction for design. These key words were sleep, drawing, and food.
Through this process, I was able to narrow down my thought process to one problem statement which I would use to move forward and design around:
“Lauren is worried about keeping up a good sleeping schedule. They need a way to maintain a good sleeping schedule on weekdays because their schoolwork and hobbies can take up a lot of time.”
Ideation Sketches
These sketches were done based on the three word maps I created earlier. I took inspiration from her pain points and began designing a smart pillow and a wireless paired wristband that would appeal to Lauren’s love of cats and also function as a way to help her achieve better quality of sleep at night.
Market Analysis
As I thought about how to design the shape of the product and the features it might have, I conducted some market research on existing smart pillows. Using this information, I tried to come up with new or other features tailored to Lauren’s personal needs.
Final Product Mockup
The final product included the pillow and wristwatch set. The wristwatch I imagined to be thin for more comfort at night when sleeping, and the smart pillow would have audio and vibration features which Lauren could use to simulate white noise, cat purring, or other soothing audio for smoother sleep.
This project taught me a lot about considering client needs and different ways I could approach the solution.
