The second semester of my first year I had to work on my first design project in Industrial Design. As subject I chose the squad “Just Cruisin’” for which we were designated to a group of 4 students. With this project our goal was to create a non-intrusive and non-distractive way of bicycle navigation. While at first we didn’t have a specific target group, our final target group were bicycle delivery people with the main focus around food delivery.
With this project, I learned how to combine the knowledge gained from previous courses, as well as some new things. One thing that I will definitely be using more often is a technique called ‘pressure cooker’. In this we went through the entire transformative iterative design process in one week. I feel this really helped to get to know both the subject and the rest of my group. Since we had to go through the full process that week, we already knew where the biggest strengths of each team members were. Our final idea for the project also came from this pressure cooker, although this was not the idea we went for with the pressure cooker.
A skill I improved because of this project was user testing. In the first quartile of this semester we did a user test to decide which way of navigating we should use. For this we used a bicycle and mounted lights, a simulated LED-matrix on the bicycle and put a screen in front of the bicycle. Taking turns through all three ways of navigating, we tried to navigate our test subjects on a route in the game ‘Grand Theft Auto V’, to see which way of navigation was best received by the subjects. It went well but I think we still could have done this better, since we decided not to explain what would happen, which had some of our test subjects a bit confused. Luckily, we still got feedback from the subjects.
A skill I improved because of this project was user testing. In the first quartile of this semester we did a user test to decide which way of navigating we should use. For this we used a bicycle and mounted lights, a simulated LED-matrix on the bicycle and put a screen in front of the bicycle. Taking turns through all three ways of navigating, we tried to navigate our test subjects on a route in the game ‘Grand Theft Auto V’, to see which way of navigation was best received by the subjects. It went well but I think we still could have done this better, since we decided not to explain what would happen, which had some of our test subjects a bit confused. Luckily, we still got feedback from the subjects.
Another skill I greatly improved was my programming skill. Until now, all programming was done in either Processing or Intel XDK, which both are limited programs. For this project, we took the leap to Android Studio. This program gives a lot more freedom for developers, which is something I know I will need in future projects too. Since this was a new program and it has quite a different feel than processing, it took a while before I knew how to use it properly. This did teach me to pick up new skills easier, which is something I have become better in through the years.
As for the group work and the distribution of work, I’m pretty satisfied. We were able to work together very nicely. This was mostly due to an open working atmosphere. This helped in making a planning and keeping to it quite well.