Design Challenge
“The project centers on a wearable or home-scale connected device meant to alleviate some of the pains and challenges around the social distancing and “stay-at-home” lifestyle. Students work in groups to identify shared challenges and common design interests, create a proposal, prototype, test, and iterate their solutions. The project challenges students to examine the formal aspects of user interface design in the context of product design as well as ethical and social implications of their designs.”
Problem
During our process, we found that social isolation can cause psychological disintegration. Lonely people are 50% more likely to die prematurely than those with healthy social connections.
Opportunity
How might we ease social isolation in a way that emulates real-life social gatherings?
Timeframe
7 Weeks
Project Type
Group School Project
Product Design
Role
Visual Product Designer
Model Builder
Story Boards
Tools
Figma
Miro
Fusion 360
Team
Solution
We developed a home scale projector equipped with a camera, controller, and virtual games that will be used as a life-size immersive social platform to facilitate interaction between people around the world.
Process
We started by coming up with the idea of building a piece that looks nice but usable in full scale. With a projector to hit the wall, and speakers to listen to others, users can socialize with each other while being not being in the same area. I drew the orthographic images to start actually being a life-size model.
Building
After the orthographic drawing, we then were approved to move on to start modeling out SiD. To actually see what it would really be like.
After this, we could then be able to test it on users and really see how the users interact with SiD.
At this time we could not 3D print these so we decided to make them out of wood. We decided to make it the attached dock because of the complex shape of the bottom and time.
Final Design
Reflection
I felt that our team had a really good success moving forward and improving. With each step, I felt that our product as a whole got a whole lot better after each session and meeting. After each critique, we got together and fixed the problem. As a team, I wish we got to meet more, and doing this project during Coronavirus, was hard. If we were able to meet in person and actually work for hand on more, we could have had more of a seamless project.