DP2: Health and Wellness

Our current design project focusses on needfinding regarding the general issue of well-being and health. The goal is to come up with a product or system that will make people healthier. Based on many interviews and synthesizing sessions, my group (Andrew and Hyejin, pictured above) has decided to focus on increasing body-awareness and encouraging good habits, specifically for the user group of sedentary office workers. We are finishing up our prototype tonight, and then tomorrow we will be filming a short video clip of the "product story," a week in the life of an office worker using our product, Kunga. Kunga is an Americanization of the Korean word for health. Stay tuned for next week's project wrap-up report...

Reflection: Design as a Form of Intelligence?

After reading Nigel Cross's "The Nature and Nuture of Design Ability," I spent some time this past weekend thinking about whether design ability is a form of intelligence in its own right, on the same level as linguistic, musical, or bodily-kinaesthetic intelligence, for example. Cross argues that design ability is separate from these previously awknowledged forms of intelligence. I am not so sure - it seems to me that what is special about design is that it draws on all types of intelligence. Our classes seem to be selected to help us develop fluency between different types of thinking. We spend time in Art 60 developing our visual language, in Calibrating the Instrument developing our improvisational and physical skills, and in ME 203 gaining machining knowledge. I have a hard time pinpointing something that is truely unique to design. I tried listing skills that designers use and associating them with other professions that seem to employ the same type of thinking. These skills cover a huge variety of professional fields - in any single project, designers have to be able to switch between these modes of thinking.

DP1 wrap-up

Here is a photo of our final prototype and a sketch showing how our emergency shelter can be arranged in a "circle-the-caravans" configuration to create larger communities from our two-person sleeping units. The central area is intended to be open for cooking and socializing, as well as providing a contained space for watching small children. The next sketch shows how the shelter is deployed. The user pulls on a handle connected to a string, which first tugs on the velcro holding the foam compressed and causes it to unlatch. The foam roof then expands upwards. As the user keeps pulling on the handle, it catches on the front of the foam roof and the pulling action helps assist the foam in expanding. Once the shelter has been deployed, there is a latch mechanism that can be engaged to keep it stable.

DP1: collapsible, self-deploying emergency shelter

These are some early sketches and prototypes for our emergency shelter design. It is meant to be air-dropped in a collapsed state and then easily deployed (perhaps by illiterate children) in a crisis situation (earthquake, flood, etc.). Stephanie (my teammate) also has some pictures on her blog: http://palomitasdemaiz-design.blogspot.com .