Why? Help working women who like wearing female suits easily find designs they want by easily connecting them with places or people who offer such designs, thus eliminating the frustration resulting from wasting time and effort on finding professional clothing.
How? An app that provides AI-based suggestions and allows fast browsing as well as communication between buyers and sellers.
What? Targeting working women, sellers, and tailors.
Reflection: Prototyping SUITS helped me better apply design concepts learned in class to a project which could potentially become a problem-solving commercial product in the future. Initially, I wasn’t sure how to address the issue mentioned above, and the in-class exercise with Sylvia helped me solidify my idea. I think that the main lessons I learned while working on this project include the importance of the iterative design cycle and constant questioning of the project concept. Before presenting the designs I made using Sketch and inVision, I had to go through many iterations. Iterating and improving my prototype helped me create an app version which could be easily usable and functional. While working on the project, I interviewed many of my friends and acquaintances about SUITS, and their feedback helped me solidify my final idea while trying to outline the most important design goals. Overall, I achieved my goal of prototyping an app which would address the business wear issue. My next steps would include reiterating through the design cycle to create a better prototype and more research as to the necessary tech as well as the business layer.
Key takeaway: Today’s class helped me solidify my final project idea. Thanks to my partner’s feedback I intend to create an app for professional women who like wearing female suits. Such an app would make it possible for women to both make a collage of what they would like to wear by combining photos with in-app design tools. I found a suggestion about creating an app which would be like “Didi for female suits” fascinating and I need to consider how to incorporate it to my project. I also really loved the idea of adding a feature for women who are not sure what kind of a suit they want. The way it would work is that such users would click on different categories which would lead them into discovering new outfit options. Such a feature may be compared to what Spotify does whenever a new user wants to register: it shows him or her photos of artists which lead to even more suggestions upon making a choice.
Additional takeaways: The exercise with Lego blocks was beneficial in understanding how to communicate clearly and seems like a useful tool of making friends quickly as well as building empathy. I also found it rather satisfying and thought-provoking to come up with ideas for my partner’s project. I felt very invested in her project while trying to make useful suggestions.
We started off with an idea to create a bracelet for people who NYU Shanghai students who are looking to meet new friends while waiting for classes. Sometimes, it takes a few hours of wait for the next class, and some students complain about the difficulty of making new connections, so making it easier for students to find people who were available at a given time and willing to network seemed like a good idea. However, during our first group meeting, we realized that creating a product for NYU Shanghai would not necessarily qualify as “commercial” and would have many flaws such as the challenge of actually finding people in the academic building. Therefore, we decided to brainstorm more. I personally played the role of the devil’s advocate, trying to question every idea and poke holes in what might have seemed like a good product idea. Eventually, Robin mentioned concert LED bracelets, Gabriel mentioned networking, and we agreed on taking our initial NYU Shanghai idea onto another level: creating a bracelet called “Connect” which would make it easier for people who attend networking events to strike up a conversation. We decided that such a bracelet should be able to change colors whenever an event organizer decides to engage the event participants into a new activity. As people bond over similarities, seeing that somebody has a bracelet of the same color (temporarily) would act as a trigger to approach and chat.
For the prototype, we decided on an LED bracelet. Nevertheless, if such a product were to be introduced into the market in the future, we would prefer it to contain an LED strip which would make it more visible. As the purpose of networking events is to engage with others, we decided to give the control over the bracelets s to the event organizer who would control the colors by an app shown below:
Such an app would make it easier to randomize colors or assign particular colors to participants who indicated, for example, their field of work.
Overall, I think that I learned a lot from the process and enjoyed working on such a talented team. I also really appreciate the feedback we were given in class. I think that the idea of creating a Connect subscription model could turn out great if we were to deploy such a product.
Drone laws differ from country to country. A website called Global Drone Regulations provides a comprehensive database of drone laws around the world and can be accessed here: https://www.droneregulations.info. Such regulations usually outline the minimum and maxim distance above ground, use in urban spaces and proximity to airports. Certain cities allow use of small drones while requiring to register bigger drones, including obtaining a special license. Commercial flights must be registered and special permits must be obtained. The following BBC article outlines commercial use of drones in rural Virginia, United States: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48029396.
Current drone laws specify mostly the parameters mentioned at the beginning of this post, but future laws are going to be more complicated and detailed depending on the use. I would imagine different regulations for drones delivering food and transporting people.
The Wing company, a Google spinoff, has won federal approval to operate its drone delivery system as an airline in the U.S.
According to the article, the US Federal Aviation Authority approved Google Wing drones for product deliveries, including mostly food and medicine. This one of the first instances in history when drones are officially approved from commercial use with the goal of product delivery. Such drones give a new “airline” status. Packages are supposed to be lowered from a drone on a rope. Australia has already approved drones for commercial use in suburban areas, and the following video by the Wall Street Journal demonstrates how drone delivery works.
Future Use Cases
I would imagine drones to have many more uses in the future. At the moment, drones are used to deliver food, for aerial photography, land surveying, pest control, utility inspection, etc. However, the use of drones is not limited to moving objects only. Drones could move up to 15 people at once in the future. the following McKinsey article outlines future drone uses. They are also outlined in the table below:
I remember when I was at the Cannes Film Festival in France, I suddenly heard a loud noise above. I looked up and saw a man flying on something that looked like a drone:
To speculate about the future commercial use of drones, I would like to make the following predictions:
Drones used as taxis for humans – one can order the drone to fly and pick them up to get to a designated location for a taxi-like fee.
Delivery of larger objects to homes, even objects as large as furniture.
Quick transportation to hospitals?
Means of travel to school for students living in remote areas.
Substitute for airplane travel for short distances.
The beginning of a new era of aerial sports, resulting in drone sports championships.
New Industry + New Regulations
Drones would come in a greater variety of shapes and sizes, and many luxury drone companies would emerge. There would be both Fiats and Bentleys of drones. Designs would be mostly be based on the Commercial Agenda aiming to solve Problems as well as address the goal of increased Performance. As drone laws are currently very different across countries, many international drone deals would need to be signed. I imagine an international drone organization to emerge which would control drone traffic. Each drone would possibly also have an international license and there would be drone border control. There would be a need for the implementation of new international drone standards as well. Many new jobs would be created in the drone industry as the result of wide adoption.
During this workshop, my team started off by defining a problem cats may face in their daily lives. We decided on a regular feeding schedule which could be facilitated by designing a soft food dispenser which could be operated from outside by the use of a mobile application. Then, we switched tables to suggest a solution to an issue stated by another group – a rather common communication issue between cats and humans. So, based on our knowledge about cats, we suggested that a solution could be a sensor which would map varying meows to what they mean and suggests whenever anything was off, for example, when a cat was sick. Subsequently, we were moved to yet another table where we built a prototype of a steering wheel which would indicate that a stray animal may be hiding under the car or in the space between the tire and the vehicle to prevent unnecessary deaths. The exercise was beneficial because after coming back to my first table I found a prototype of a cat dispenser which was suggested by my group.
On the one hand, I think that such an ideation method may be very useful in design teams at various companies. However, the design we found at our table different a lot from what we had in mind while stating the initial problem. Hence, I think that the method needs some improvement because there seemed to be a varying degree of knowledge about cats and their needs in the teams participating in the workshop. This is why the prototype I saw on my table did not match at all the prototype my squad would have designed if were had remained there. Most importantly, it did not address the problem of soft food. Instead, the prototype suggested a dry food dispenser. To improve the future design process, I would suggest that each team provides more contest to the remaining groups during the first part of the workshop.
