The Extended Family Room – Merging design and engineering to connect loved ones via smart home furnishings
Design Brief
Amidst a surge of interest in “smart home” products, your design and engineering firm has secured a new client looking to create a new range of smart home furnishings. However, unlike most of the products on the market today, the client is not interested in merely practical improvements to the conventional function of furnishings. Instead they are interested in how furniture and furnishings in the Living Room can become extensions of our human relationships, enhancing a sense of awareness and connection between family members or friends.
Challenge
The client has given our team a specific home furnishing –a curtain– from their current product line and has asked us to create a concept that involves embedding technology in that furnishing to provide an experience. We are allowed to alter the given item but not so significantly that it becomes unrecognizable compared to its original form.
The client is not sure who they want to connect via their furnishings. They would like us to brainstorm and select a specific kind of family or friend relationship that would be connected via the furnishing and use that as a point of inspiration for your concept.
The client is not sure who they want to connect via their furnishings. They would like us to brainstorm and select a specific kind of family or friend relationship that would be connected via the furnishing and use that as a point of inspiration for your concept.
The client is interested in creating a surprising experience or interaction with something familiar. The client wants to avoid ordinary technology-like interfaces and therefore does not want the innovation to contain any form of screen, keyboard, mouse, camera, etc.
Role
Research
Ideation and strategy
Front end development
Product design and development
Presentation
Feedback management
Project Timeline
4 weeks
Approach
From the client's brief, we decide to settle on two potential starting points:
Connecting over space: Imagine multiple friends or family who each live in different places owning the same furnishing, and these furnishings are connected in some way to convey a sense of activity between the locations that makes you feel closer to those people – like you are living in the same house.
Design
Our framing question:
Spread over the world, dislocated by distance, disturbed by time - what does it mean to maintain relationships in the age of global mobility and infinite digital memory?
Shadow+Hunter is a smart curtain design to enhance the relationships between family members. The furniture reflects the concept of creating connections and togetherness of the loved ones through a playful activity. Shadow+Hunter is the first to create the surprising experience of ‘shadow capturing’. Referencing back to the ancient cultural shadow shows in Turkey and universally famous bedtime stories, our furniture combines shadow plays with storytelling. The thinking behind this is to uplift the experience of the user by using embedded technology, while also moving away from the tech-craze of today’s world.
Shadow+Hunter records the shadows –figures of shadows– made by the hand or body
movements of the family members, in the presence of sunlight, in different times of the day. The shadows are then displayed back to the family as the entire play unfolds in front them, which becomes the perfect time to unwind for the parents as they spend time with their children, all huddled up in the Family Room. Shadow+Hunter records, stores, and displays what has happened throughout the day, presenting a story for the family. It is a moment of reminiscing memories and re-connecting with each other via the smart curtain, our Shadow+Hunter.
movements of the family members, in the presence of sunlight, in different times of the day. The shadows are then displayed back to the family as the entire play unfolds in front them, which becomes the perfect time to unwind for the parents as they spend time with their children, all huddled up in the Family Room. Shadow+Hunter records, stores, and displays what has happened throughout the day, presenting a story for the family. It is a moment of reminiscing memories and re-connecting with each other via the smart curtain, our Shadow+Hunter.
Family activities lack the ability to entertain different generations of the family at the same time. New-age interfaces dampen motor skills and muscles and distract the creative process. Thus the design of the Shadow+Hunter was engineered through the research of natural behavior around curtains to avoid inconveniences to the user. Where the initial aim is to create this playful activity, the option of returning our Shadow+Hunter into another curtain-next-door was granted to our user.
A selection of images we included in our moodboards along the way. We focused on technology, games, generations, traditions, bridging memories.
We were assigned to work with curtains. These were curtains were 17 USD at the IKEA store.
