The project was part of Design Theory, which involved making product iterations mainly playing with product semantics, testing these with users, observing their behaviour and manufacturing knowledge and deriving insights from it. Thus, each iteration generated some insight and served as an artefact. These artefacts and the associated insights were to be then displayed like museum artefacts.
We had to observe a daily activity and picking out an interesting task from the process so as to experiment with the tangible aspect of the task and understand the human-object interaction.
We had to observe a daily activity and picking out an interesting task from the process so as to experiment with the tangible aspect of the task and understand the human-object interaction.
Hacking the product! i.e. change usage method, play with size, shape, colour & texture.
I picked the activity of using a tea bag for making tea.
Each iteration was tested with people and the observations were documented. Here is the example of one of such artefact-person interaction study.
Displaying the Tea bag artefacts. Each artefact was supported with a tag on which I put doodles and statements of what people said and felt when they saw or used my artefacts.
From what the user felt and said, I drew out few observations and conclusions, thus manufacturing knowledge from the artefacts.
Few of the insights, based on the artefact and context of usage. I made posters to depict my observations of the experiments. The observation were simple things like the effect of color on the user, how transperancy and opaqueness of an artefact are interpreted differently, different handling to do change in size and shape of parts and interpretation of the size of the artefact.
