Design Project I (June 21, 2020)
Shreyas Bal,
2nd Year Industrial Design,
National Institute of Design Andhra Pradesh.
Course- Simple Product Design
Guide- Kuntal De
June 18 & 19, 2020
I have been in a bit of confusion. I was stuck at some questions, which I would like to mention below-
After a while of constantly thinking about them, I thought of just getting a break from all of this and started reading some books. While reading the book ‘ Things that Make us Smart’ I came across a very interesting and useful concept, which I was in dire need of. I highly recommend everyone reading this. It goes like this-
The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult. Unaided memory, thought, and reasoning are all limited in power. Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thoughts and reasoning? By the invention external aids: it is things that make us smart. Some assistance comes through cooperative, social behavior: some arises through exploitation of the information present in the environment; and some comes through the development of tools of thought- cognitive artifacts- that complement abilities and strengthen mental powers. (the opening paragraph of chapter 3, Things that make us smart, 1993.)
After reading this, I got the answers to all my questions. I understood that we humans are really good at doing a task, provided the external cues, signifiers and instructions are present. Also, that when it’s the matter of health, people are ready to learn new habits, which will protect them from severe diseases!
June 20 & 21, 2020
Finally, I started conceptualizing about the product, based on the keywords I laid out before. Now that my questions had been answered, it was a bit easy to conceptualize. Following are the sketches of the concepts I came up with-
After conceptualizing, I could clearly see some of the concepts to be better than the others. So, in order to find out the concepts fulfilling the most parameters, I made this assessment matrix. Assessment matrix is quite a helpful method for comparing between different concepts and features. It gives us a direct comparison between the concepts, so as to pick up the one which has the highest feasibility.
The Assessment Matrix
Following is the assessment matrix, to understand which of the concepts fulfil the required features the most.
So after comparing all of the concepts I decided to detail out the one which fulfills the most parameters. Here is a quick sketch and render of Concept 6, to understand it better-
