Proj 2 REFLECTION

Comparing with the projects I have done before, this project is harder and more complicated. We are not only asked to design a pure product to solve a particular problem, but a product within a service system. We spent much more time on research to understand how the current system running in our design area and how can we improve the system. This means we are not only need to understand the customers, our target market, but also the manufacturer. In other words, we need to understand the whole product life cycle and every institution involved in this cycle. And we cannot design any PSS and a product to fit this PSS, we also need to pay attention to sustainability and the design areas are arrowed to food, mobility, health.

Luckily, it is not a project for individual, we are asked to work as a group. I am satisfied with my group, everyone in our group put much effort to this project and we separate the equal workload to everyone. We sometimes have different opinion, but we can all agree to one point of view after our discussion. Most groups have three people, but we have four, so we thought we should find a challenging design area and do more work than other groups. This is why we chose to do mobility at the very first. We did many researches on it, and tried to understand its environmental, social, economic areas. We got many concepts, but all infeasible. This lead to us came to our final PSS until week 3. Anyhow, we finished this project, we feel so relaxed after the final presentation. Maybe the result is not very well, but we do tried our best and I really enjoy the process to work with my group members.

As an industrial designer, I do think we need to consider PSS among our solution finding strategies. This is because the product itself is not independently exists and users are not the only part involved in the system. After watched the film of ‘The 11^th Hour’, I know that with the production of one truck of products, it can leads to 32 trucks of waste. It is true that one design might solve a problem, the designed product might match a specific customers’ need, but we don’t want to create more problems after that. If we use the design of cars as an example, we may find that cars really make our transportation much more convenient. Cars really bring us higher quality of life. Cars accelerate the development of the economy. But did the designers consider the environmental issues created by cars? Did they consider the end life of cars? Did they consider every worker involved in this system? It is true that we designers are asked to solve problems, but we are not asked to create more problems. This why I think PSS is so important.

Designs for Living

There are varieties of products around us. As a consumer, we focus more on the appearance of a product, the function of the product and the value of the product. We are always trying to find a product, a design which has the best solution to match our specific needs. Designers also focus on the appearance, the function, the value of a product, but we are more interested in the story behind a product that is how the designer comes to this solution and through which way the designer can communicate to the customers through his or her design.

After many projects I’ve done, I find it is the hardest part. The product, the design is not independently exists. ‘Emotion’ is always emphasized, the product, the design should make dialogue to the users. If we can see the emotion exist in a product, we may see it as part of our life, through this way, the product can be more close to our life. This can be the maximum value the product can reach which is more important than the function, the appearance of it. Many similar products can give customers the same function, the appearance can be changed easily, but emotion is irreplaceable.

The video talks a lot of chair design. It reminds me one of the chair design shown in the Power House Museum – Young Hearts Swing Freely. Patterns made by strings with different colors really give the boring chair a new life. The design is quite special from nowadays modern chair designs. It reminds me the time when I was a child, my grandma did weaving beside me.

The kitchen design, the room separate cupboard are really cool. We are living in the age with large population, room saving is quite important and they can make our life easier with reducing the steps to solve a problem. The light design is awesome, it can be adjusted to fit different customer’s need. Why we like these designs? The reason is they are closely connected to our life. They are designed to match the environment, they are designed to match more customers’ favor, and they are designs for living.

CLIMATE CHANGE – The 11th hour

This film is about to raise our awareness of the increasing seriousness of the environmental issues. Currently, there are many films related to climate change and disasters like ‘The Day After Tomorrow’, ‘Flood’. These films are more like to describe a specific disaster, a story. The 11^th hour is different, it is a documentary film. Many experts participate in this film, they tell us the seriousness of the climate change and how the relationship between our human and the nature is destroyed. They also guide us to change the current situation and our human destiny. To be honest, the film is a little bit tedium, but almost all of what the experts say are very reasonable and set me thinking.

The film mentioned that the planets have different distance from the sun. Some of them are too hot, some of them are too cold. The earth is the most and the only suitable planet for us to live now. I’ve heard that scientists are exploring to find the second planet for us to live now, but no one knows whether that will be possible and whether we have enough time to wait when that comes true. If not, all what we are doing now is like a suicide. I truly agree with what one viewpoint mentioned by one expert in the film. He said the earth can go back to green after many years. All the destroyed forests, polluted lakes can go back to what they were, this is because the earth has all the time in the world, but we don’t.

We human are advanced animal, that is true. But we do not have the authority to control the other lives and we are not allowed to ask for resources from the nature endlessly. Each species exist for some reason, we are equal. The development of the economy cannot be an excuse to destroy the relation between us and the nature. When the temperature of the earth goes up to 250^。C and we are no longer to survive. Can the money mean anything to us? Who cares how modern is your car, how luxury is your diamond? The nature gives us too much, and it is time for us to pay back to the nature. Otherwise, it will not be an equal deal between us and the nature. We will be abandoned.

As a designer, we should focus on how to allocate the resource more efficiently to match consumer needs. We do need to consider the whole life cycle of the product from the material used to the end life of the product. We can change consumer minds, we can change consumer behaviors. We can use our design to tell everyone that we are living in a sustainable world.

PEER COMMENTS

Li, XiaoLing Susanna

Daugherty, Ryan

Widjaja, Jennifer

Shao, LuFei Vivian

Chan, Wawen

DESIGNING FOR DISASTER

SELF-INFLATED LIFE BUOY 

Background

We are designing for floods in China. Flood happens frequently in China and  China is a country with large population, so when flood comes , a lot of people lose their homes, get injured or even die.  According to this background, I choose to focus on the speed to rescue people through my product design which means how to improve the time efficiency to reduce the injuries and deaths.

Life buoy can be considered as one of the most important tools during rescue. I did researches on the current life buoy situation at the very beginning and found that the normally used life buoy nowadays is not convenient for people to carry. During rescue, rescuer can only carry 2 once and the other way is to put some life buoys in a boat. These 2 ways can really delay the precious rescue time.

My concept

My target market is people who live in flood- prone areas and my concept is a self-inflated life buoy which can catch a lot of air to provide people buoyancy with the help of a spring. The original shape of this product is a round container with 3 main components on it: the air duct, the button to release the container and the spring inside it.

How does my product work?

1.      Open the cap of the air duct

2.      Press the two buttons around the edge of the container to release the cap (the whole product will pop out immediately to catch air)

3.      Close the cap of the air duct(the product is now like a tube)

4.      Connect the two ends around your waist with buckle

5.      Finished

The whole process spends you less than 15 seconds.

How it answers the brief, benefits?

It is portable due to the size is not too big and it is much smaller comparing with current life buoy and most parts of this product are made from plastic, it is not heavy. So people who live in flood-prone areas can always take this product with them.  No matter when flood comes, they are already prepared.

On the other hand, rescuers can carry more once, they can put many of this products in a bag and give them to people who need it. This can help to save the rescue time

In conclusion, this product can cover both preparedness and response areas in the disasters. People can get prepared before flood comes or rescuers can save more lives during the disaster.

REFLECTION

In the past two years I learned many skills to improve the communication: CAD, sketching, rhino and workshop operation. Now my presentation is more like a real presentation. But I do need to apologize of my poor oral presentation, that is why I put so many effort to do the model, try my best to make the appearance more like a real product and even make it not only a appearance model but also can show how does it work. And also I spent a quite a long time to do the CAD and rendering. Hope all these efforts can show you a good communication. English is not my first language; I really need to improve my English and I hope I can do better for the next project, I will spend more time to prepare my oral presentation for the next project.

And I think the past studios are more focus on products’ aesthetics, practicability. This project is more focus on to solve a problem. There are many solutions to solve a problem, but our task is to find the best solution which requires time efficiency, practicability and we also need to consider the materials used and product cost of the product. That is not easy for us to do this whole project, which is why I feel so relaxed after the presentation.

As an industrial designer, we are designing products not only can be used, but also help to improve people’s quality of life. We should always keep an eye on what is happening now; we need to think is there anyone waiting for us to help him or her. There are quite a lot requirements in our daily life, some may happen frequently but we do not discover it.

For this project, it is so lucky that I decided to design a self-inflated life buoy from the second week and keep developing my concepts in the following weeks. But I spent so much time on researching materials and technologies, some of them are not necessary towards my final design. And I spent a long time to do the model in the last week. Spent 3 days in the workshop to do the outside model and 3 nights to do the sewing of the inside model. If I could have more time or I was to do this project again, I really want to do some floating test. Try to find out how many air the product need and the load weight. These are really important to show evidence of the practicability of my product.

THE STORY OF BOTTLED WATER &THE STORY OF COSMETICS

I quite like the visual communication of this series of videos: simple but clear, and interesting. I feel so embarrassed that I just bought a bottle of water before watching the story of bottled water. To be honest, I do not rely on bottled water in my daily life, most of the time I choose tap. I think most people, we sometimes choose to buy bottled water due to it is convenient to get. Although I always complain the price of bottled water, I still trust it may be worth that money. I know that not every brand of bottled water use water comes from mountains streams and pristine nature, I still trust it is clean, health and has minerals in it. But the truth makes me so disappointed. It’s really hard to believe that a third of all bottled water comes from tap! I feel so frustrated that I spent a lot on these expensive but worthless, low-cost products.

                                                                                                          

In China, tap water is not that clean enough people can drink directly from it. We usually boil first. You can imagine how inconvenient in summer, hot water takes a long time to cool down. Due to this reason, most families have water dispenser at home. Few years ago, it costs only 10 RMB to get water bucket changed. They are cheap and clean, so we consume a lot large bottles of water during summer time which are trashing the environment all along the product’s life cycle. We known that real recycling would turn bottles back into bottles, but I would never trust before watching this video that 80% of bottles end up in landfills, where they will sit for thousands of years, or burned in incinerators which can release toxic pollution.

The story of cosmetics is more focus on product safety. We rely on cosmetics every day, especially for ladies. I can’t imagine if they all contain toxic chemicals, how badly would they affect our health? Do we need to worry about cancer or other problems every time we use cosmetics? But we really need them. Face cream, shampoo…these basic cosmetics have already became part of our life. What is more terrible is that on cosmetics labels, words like “herbal”, “natural”, even “organic” have no legal definition. That means anybody can put anything in a bottle and call it natural. I really don’t know what product brand can I trust? What products can I buy? Why the current situation is like this? Profit?! That’s ridiculous. Isn’t health the most important? I trust life can be better without toxics in, toxics out.

The bottled water and cosmetics can be considered as counterexamples. They are irresponsible for the others, for the society, for the environment. ‘Sustainable’ is the key word in recent design and manufacturing field. As an industrial designer, we really need to consider the sustainable development in our design through choosing sustainable materials and thinking about the product life cycle, the manufacturing process and product end of life. We should design for environmental sustainability, socio-ethical sustainability. And we should transfer this sustainable development consciousness to everyone around us.

RECYCLING

It is easy to associate our fast growing standard of living with the huge amount of products, the huge amount of packaging used in our daily life. If we make statistical investigation and analysis of the amount of packaging, materials, resources used for our daily production, the result can be amazing. We’ve already got a similar experience through ecological footprint.

The main theme of these videos is to give packaging a new life through converting packaging waste to new products. In simple words, they are all about recycling. From these 7 videos, I learned not only the different processed of materials being recycled, but also some thinking about how to use materials more efficiently and minimize the waste. As a designer, our design should always keep with issues of current situation. Environment issues are hot topics in recent years. If we ignore these issues, our design will never be acknowledged by the society.

The processes of materials being recycled are quite similar. On the whole, it can be concluded to the process of sort – clean – combine – create new. Plastic is separated according to what kind of plastic the packaging is manufactured from which include PE, PP, PET, and PS… New products from waste plastic include pipes and children’s toys. Glass is sorted according to colors. Fragments which are smaller than 15mm can be sorted correctly and on the basis of light absorbed, computer can determine what has to be removed. Waste glass can make new bottles through blowing. Paper is sorted according to paper quality while impurities and printing are removed. Cardboard box, newspaper can be produced from waste paper. Tissue, toilet rolls also contain high proportion of waste paper between 60% and 70%. A can that is return to the production loop can be recycled without any quality losses. Examples of recycling from waste tin include railway and car body. Manufacture aluminum sheets which can be printed as packaging require only 1/20 of the energy otherwise needed for the production of new goods and production waste will return to production loop for the next production. For beverage cartons, Plastic and aluminum separate from cardboard, the paper fraction is removed and process to premium waste paper. The remaining of plastic and aluminum are subsequently used in cement production.

Before watching these videos, I’ve already got an opinion that we should combine our design with our environment. We should always think how can we use minimum material to make a product and is there exists any alternative choices of new materials? There are many ways to satisfy customers through our design; the hardest thing is to choose the best.

Luckily, we see people pay more and more attention to protect our environment, to save resources, to recycling and  there are more and more ecodesigners. As an industrial designer, we are important to translate our learning to materials and environment to people around us through our product.