After learning about enchanted objects, we worked in teams to go through a design process intended to help cats. There were three stages for each step of the process. In the first stage, our group thought of problems that cats may face. Nobody in our group had much experience with cats, but we inferred that cats would have problems with communicating with their owners for needs they had, like food and affection. Cats cannot express their needs in words, which would make communicating with humans sometimes a challenge.
In the next stage, we sought to find a solution to a problem that another group brought up. They were concerned about how to feed and nourish stray cats. We started thinking of how stray cats behave in the winter, and discussed how they tend to go under cars and on top of car tires for warmth. With this knowledge, we came up with a detection system under cars and above tires to watch out for cats. Sensors would alert drivers before they restarted their car to prevent injuring the cat, and would also inform nearby animal shelters of the cat in the area. This would allow shelters to look out for the cat and be ready to feed and shelter it.
At the last stage, we moved to a different group to make a prototype of another solution. The problem brought up was the excessive amount of cat dishes needed to be cleaned, with some solutions including combining dry and wet food dishes together and a self cleaning bowl. We took these ideas and made a stacked bowl prototype out of modeling clay, with a dry food bowl above a water bowl. The dry food bowl would have small tubes going down the side of the bowl at the edges, so that when cats eat from the edge, their saliva would go down the tubes and end up in the bottom wet food bowl, decreasing the amount of cleaning owners would have to do.
This process of brainstorming ideas, making solutions, and creating a prototype was a fun experience, since we were collaborating with other groups’ ideas at each stage. So, the resulting prototypes were the result of everyone’s contribution, which is much like how design in the real world is like.