Product Interface Design – Session 4

Balaji and Vaanmiki came up with interesting ideas and documented them on A4 sheets.

Ideas mapping

They were entered in to the Mindomo online mindmapping software and was uploaded.

Suresh Mohan went on a pilgrimage trip to Tirupati and absconded for the next two days for giving prasadham to his parents, Balaji was busy with his passport. So with Vaanmiki I started exploring further on the designs.

With the ideas clubbed together we had come up with 3 themes to work.

1. A Mosquito liquid repellent combined with a pad vaporisor

2. A Thin liquid repellent, with minimum components on the product.

3. A highly sophisticated product with autocutoff, hours adjusting, night lamp in to the product.

The first concept was explored further and additional ideas were added as we progressed.

Initial Idea Sketch

The idea sketch was refined further to incorporate reality – we thought about materials, manufacturing – detailing of how the components are going to be fitted to each other. Without loosing focus on the primary ideas of improving the user interface and giving it new looks.

Vaanmiki had developed for his understanding a 2 Dimensional layout with dimensions, to make the product close to reality. They are working on the visualising the  product in 3 Dimension and detailing it for presentation .

Product Interface Design – Literature

There is lots of literature connected with product interface design, some information from the net.

1. the interface is the product

User Interfaces and — any product Interface — is very difficult to build.  How do you design eating utensils for people with arthritic hands?  Answering that question is not easy — the physiology of arthritic hands is complex; designing objects that hands with arthritis can grasp, hold, and use is a difficult problem.  That’s just an example, but the point is this: The face of any product is the product.

Here’s a revealing experience from Erasmus Smums:

I don’t know what percentage of our time on any computer based project is spent getting the equipment to work right, but if I had a gardener who spent as much of the time fixing her shovel as we spend fooling with our computers, I’d buy her a good shovel. At least you can buy a good shovel.

Erasmus Smums

I’ve always been fascinated by man-machine interactions, as well as man-product interactions.  I was influenced early on by someone whom I consider a master ethnographer who taught me that humans’ non-conscious interactions with machines or products or the world around them reveal much more than anything uttered.

Currently I’m re-reading The Design of Everyday Things and The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems and also studying case studies on product development and ethnography.

Incidentally, while Toyota doesn’t use the term “ethnography”, they do in fact employ this method in how they build cars.  The term “Genchi Genbutsu” means spending time where value is created or “Go and See”.  Toyota engineers are notorious for spending time driving Toyota cars and learning about how it handles and how to improve it through using it.  They also watch — sometimes for hours, days, or weeks machines or other items that are performing strangely.  They watch; they observe; then they improve.

The Interface is the Product

For most people, the thing they touch, whether it be a graphical user interface, the screen of your blackberry, or the face on your microwave oven, or the jar of jelly that you used to make peanut butter sandwiches for your children’s lunch — that thing that you touch and interact with is the product to you.  The buttons you pushed on the Microwave IS the microwave to your consciousness, not the metal or other electrical gadgetry inside the microwave.  Granted, there is much more to the product; but, by and large, the thing that you interact with consciously becomes the product in our minds.  The key, then, is to create an interface such that is accomplishes the objective in a humane and pragmatic way.

Setting Some Goals

I want to be more observant in my interactions with people, processes, and things.  I want to watch, observe, and then they improve.

2. Integration and Communication – Teaching the key elements to successful product Interface – An Acrobat file will open in a new window.

3. Cooking product interface related to aging population – A masters Thesis

4. DSGND - Design, Information Visualizing and Prototyping – Graphic Design Interfaces

5. Good and Bad Product Interfaces – Examples

6. Bad Design Examples

7. Successful product Interfaces

8. Applied Ergonomics and Design – At TU Delft course structure

Product Interface Design – Session 3

Idea Geneartion :

For every problem, ideas were genereated and documented using the mindmap software.

MIndmap ideas for mosquito repellant.

These ideas are now, puttogether from a jigsaw puzzle in to an intersting over all product idea.

3 concepts are being worked out.

Product Interface Design – Session 1

At centroid, various activities in giving exposure to design has been started.

Some of the activities done are, every week a few people take a particular design topic and explore about them and present. Along with this activity the professional work done in that week is also shared so every one understands what goes in a design based exercise.

Every member of the team work on very specific activities like concept design, engineering design, prototyping or analysis. But every individual needs to understand the full process of design and undergo the process personally to appreciate the design, and allow him to have a clear understanding.

To aid this understanding – a series of design projects are being taken.

The Methodology adopted to design is briefed as follows after identifying the product to be designed.

1. Brief Research

Understanding about the product, finding information related to similar products in market, cost, method of working, usage instructions, material and process of manufacturing. Visual feel and trends in that particular category is researched and information is documented as an acrobat format file.
The second stage in brief research is personllay using the product – during use Observe , document and analyse. Document the observations through photographs and videos and capture them as flash or powerpoint files.

2. Define problem statement

Define the problem statement in a framework. The problem statement can be in the form of improving the aesthetic appeal, improving the ergonomics, improving the function, design a futuristic product – etc. The more clearly the problem statement is defined the focussed the solutions will be.

3. Product Configuration

Product configuration is the arrangement of the different elements of the product based on a certain pattern, arrangement in space. The pattern may follow any story line based on funtion, aesthetics, human factors etc.,

Study the existing products and document the product end to end, so we know where we are starting from and this also opens up lots of areas for exploring and getting intimate with the product and involved with the design.

The documentation process consists of
a. Drawing the layout of the existing product – An orthographic view of the product is documented with the required dimensions, bill of materials, – the layout of both the external and the internal configuration is documented

b. Listing Interfaces – list all interfaces like visual , tactile etc., and give specifiations for the interface elements. like the weight of the product should be x gms, because it has to be easy to carry. The size of the letters on the product should be visible from a distance of 1 feet when being held on the hand.
- List all internal and external interfaces, the internal interfaces consists of the internal packaging items that define the skin of the product.

4. Concept Design – Idea Generation

Brainstroming and generating various themes for development of the idea is the first stage in concept design. Use softwares for mindmapping. Convert these verbal ideas to quick visual sketches, showing different concepts – atleast come up with 20 concepts to begin with, let your creativity flow at this stage. The concepts can be as a whole product or for elements of the product. But each idea should have a story why it has been designed in a certain way.

Make 3 final concepts as sketches and draw the full product in different views, and possible 3D views if possible, so as many details that could be shown to highlight the design elements in the product.

Make block models, concept foam models the validate the interface design idea as a physical form.

5. CAD models

Generate 3 dimensional data of the internal and the external components. Generate photorealistic images and add text and graphics to the product using photoshop software. Make concept presentation sheets, to showcase the design – every individual needs to present 3 concepts for an individual product they are designing.

6. Preliminary Engineering

The preliminary engineering phase and cad model goes hand in hand, during this phase have an excel sheet with Bill of materials of the components, the weight, material, cost and process of manufacturing.

7. Detailed Engineering

Based on the material of the product, the engineering is done and details of fitment, fastening are added. A typical plastic product will have details like thickness, lip detailing, ribs and bosses – no or less sidecores in design, snap fitments etc., A sheet metal design product which is manufactured in CNC pressbrakes are to be done as sheetmetal development drawings with requreid notches at the corners and the other fitment details of welding indicated.

8. Engineering Drawings

Detailed engineering drawings are drawn on the respective softwares itself where 3D modeling is done. The engineering drawings will contain part drawings, assembly drawings and exploded view drawings showing clearly the design intent, and these drawings should be suitable for manufacturing the product.

9. Design report, documentation and presentation

The final stage is documenting the full contents to form a report, the 3D models are converted as animations as rotation in 360 degrees and exploded views creation. The final report will be submitted as a 2D animation in Flash format for documentation purpose.