Creativity & Aesthetics

To describe the integration of this expertise area I would like to divide it again in the former ‘Ideas and concepts’ and ‘form and senses’, because my expertise in this directions is different: I will describe a pitfall in the ‘ideas and concepts’ part. Here it comes: I doubt too many things. This makes it in the beginning of the process hard to let go and freely ideate, and makes it hard to make decisions (for example choosing a context).

 

In the ideation phase I tackled this by using ideation techniques from the ‘Tinkertoys’ book (Michalco, 2006) and asking peers to participate in my ideation session, which led to the definition of my design goal. However, I think I should have done this more so I would have had a bigger quantity of ideas to choose from, which would have been beneficial for the quality of the concepts.

 

Further in the design process, when deepening a concept, a more analytical approach is needed: The analytical approach I possess intuitively (a bit too much). I have to watch myself not to analyze too much literature, which gives me an overload of information causing me to doubt everything and postpone decision making. I should not search for design answers in literature, but use literature as inspiration or starting point of a design. However, this analytical thinking approach also enabled me to understand family home lighting use in depth, derive functionalities and requirements and define the home feeling. Therefore this pitfall definitively also can be a strength.

In future individual projects, I think I should collaborate more with different stakeholders, because this speeds up decision making as described in the internship report.

 

Now about form and senses, my favourite: I believe I proved to be strong in this area by using my critical aesthetic eye, knowledge of making and fabricating, feeling for material and attention to detail in the demonstrators of the thuisjes. I am pleased with the look and feel of the demonstrator and the dummy models. I would have liked to put more attention to detail in the interaction, by animating the behaviour of the LED and hue light, but for a proof of concept this was sufficient.

 

Lastly I also fulfilled a learning goal! I implemented my sketching skills developed in the exploratory sketching course in my project. I used sketching as a design tool to ideate on form, functions, interactions and expression and to communicate my context. My sketching style became an important part of my visual identity.

Technology & Realisation

Another learning goal alert: building a working demonstrator. I needed to prove myself that I am able to do so on my own, and I did! I always have been unsure, if not scared for the digital part of realization, because I do not think like a computer, and I have a hard time adapting to these unintuitive thinking machines. But, with the patient help of a great teacher, who made me understand the code and how it should be written, I managed to program my lines of code. Hereby my attitude changed: it felt magical to see my electronics come to life, and it made me feel powerful to make my design behave like I want it to. I now know I will never become a programmer, but I have the understanding and the confidence that I can prototype the behaviour of my designs myself.

User & Society

The design goal of the project was to create, or emphasize the home feeling in family homes. I feel that in our fast society where people have more and more digital contact with each other, the need to have a pleasant, physical place to be and feel good, also grows. Therefore I believe that this project, focusing on everyday living in the home environment, taps into this societal trend. Within the project, I broadened my knowledge of psychology and sociology in search of the home feeling. The literature research on the basic human needs in specific made me understand the aspects that drive human behaviour better.

Business & Entrepreneurship

This competency area is less present in my final bachelor project. I did a small search on the products currently available on the market and based the 4 proposed interfaces of the scenario’s on products of Philips and IKEA. Furthermore I discovered that the ‘home feeling’ has, next to emotional value, a great commercial value as many companies advertise their products on a blanket of home feeling. But it can be red in ‘growth’ that I have developed this competency area during the course of designing tangible business models and during my board year.

Math, Data & computing

I did not implement this expertise area in my project. Or, maybe, the math and computing part a little bit when writing my code. But I believe I developed this area sufficiently in other educational activities: during the sounds good course  (see growth 3.X) I build a descriptive model that described the acoustic behaviour of a room, implementing the knowledge and skills learned in calculus, physics, and the science of sound and music in a real life case.

Design & Research Processes

The design process of the project can be divided into two parallel processes: the design process of the product, and defining the home feeling. Both were an iterative process, linked closely to each other at every evaluation moment. But still I had a hard time combining the two processes into one, for one reason: overview. Where I usually am strong in this aspect, guiding design processes in a team (as done by Intermedia, Smart textiles and CEL), it was a different story on my own this time. Partly because of the decision making difficulties as described under creativity and aesthetics, partly because of starting a design project again after 1,5 years of different activities (see growth 3.X).

 

Especially the first half of the semester, up until the midterm demo day were messy. I started a lot of activities, but did not finish them due to insecurity of going the ‘right’ way. Although I needed this time and these mistakes to find a way of working, I believe I lost a great amount of time that I would have been happy to use in other design activities.

 

After the midterm demo day improved my way of working: I wrote the scenarios and they served as the backbone of my design process, it lit up my view on the context, so to speak, but I also used them to validate the 4 proposed concepts, to analyze lighting use and derive functionalities that led to the concept. By the time I came here, I noticed that I did not start designing from the home feeling, so that the concept did not fit the home feeling yet in a satisfying way. A valuable insight that needed to be fixed.

Therefore I started ideating again, trying to build another concept that would fit better. Here I had two options: develop the concept to a higher quality, but be unable to develop a demonstrator for the demo day. Or leave the concepts as it is, and be able to build a demonstrator of high quality, integrating an important learning goal (realization) and creating the chance to show where I am good at (aesthetics). For the quality of the design process it would have been good to fix the concept problem, but I chose to go for the demonstrator. I learned to put my perfectionism on the side for a moment, to benefit the overall quality of the project. This showed I had regained the overview of the process that was not present in the first half of the project.

Vision & Identity

This project showed me once more that I am a team player. Collaboration with different people amplifies my strengths, as tasks can be divided so I do not have to worry about all the details of a project. It takes weight of my shoulders, knowing that I do not have to perform a project on my own, and it is just a lot more fun to collaborate, share my passion for design with others and spark others with this enthusiasm. Teamwork keeps me much sharper than an individual project.

Another, very important part of my identity as a designer, is that I proved myself that I am able to design again. After my burnout I badly needed this confidence to proceed with my studies.

 

I started this project with redefining my vision on design, and desired identity as a designer. During the first half of the design process, I needed to let go of all these requirements of calm technology and ambient communication to get started with the project. From there I went where the project took me, which was not miles from my identity and vision:

 

The fascination of living environments, what we do from day to day, where we live and how these environments influence our behaviour or feelings was still what my project was about. I designed a possible link between the physical living environment and the digital way of controlling this environment. What is most important to me, when I look at my portfolio, is to design for ‘normal’ people. I am not a designer who is going to change the world, designing for social change, or specifically for wellbeing, or for elderly. I design for everyone’s everyday life, to make the link between our physical and digital living environments just a little bit more pleasant, fun and unobtrusive.