Author: Echo Chi

The first one is the usage of a tape. My friend lent me an electric device before, since the electric wire of this device is long he used the tape fix it. Instead of using the common tape, he used the skeleton of tape to fix it( I don’t know how to explain it, you can know what exactly it is through the picture). It’s amazing, I hadn’t imagined before that tape can be used in that way. I always use some rubber bands to fix the electric wires and when I want to draw out the wire, I must take the rubber bands off. Then they are easy to disappear! But with the tape, what originally you need to use it in daily life, it’s always there.

Second one is the bookmark. It is different from other bookmarks which are a piece of hard paper. By adding a curve, it can be more beautiful and easy to be used. Readers can be easier to know where exactly they read before. The ordinary bookmarks are not easy to be found sometimes.

The third one is the hand washing machines each floor in NYU shanghai. (I forgot to take pictures.) They are also interactive. Since the entrance of campus building and library is a little bit far from the restrooms. The people who come into school and come into the library are sometimes with dirty hands because touching something outside and they want to be tidy maybe because they are going to read books or go to B1 to have lunch. It’s interactive and convenient to put a hand washing machine near the entrances.

We first worked in pairs and picked 15 pairs of Lego then my partner built something with his Lego.

Then I worked with a new partner and tried to build the same thing as the other made by Lego. This is so difficult because I must close my eyes and only by the description of my partner to the Lego.

Unfortunately, I didn’t build the same one in the end. However through this, I can understand sometimes, only by words, the design is hard to be met the requirements.

So the next part is to design the project my partner wanted to make out. We drew everything we wanted and thought as many ideas as possible. Then we exchanged our projects and ideas for each other’s project.

It really helped me to discover more aspects and new methods to reach my design goal. And with writing down and drawing, it is so easy to understand.

In this workshop, we had a design process by designing and prototyping other’s idea and projects. The subjects we were going to design is cats.

With my group, all owning cats, first listed our problems during raising cats, such as the problem of cleaning the food bowl and the problem of cats’ drinking dirty water.

We picked one, most necessary to be solved, which is the cleaning problem of food bowls. Since the food bowl contains wet and dry food so sometimes, cleaning is a rough and troublesome task. The owner must wash the bowl again and again.

The most surprising part is to switch to other’s problems and help them to solve their problem.

That really expanded my mind and forced me to think more about design.

You should not only focus on others’ requirement but also need to make a project which doesn’t exist or hasn’t developed well and also, you need to keep it in good appearance.

We designed for the problem of the obstacles between the express of cat’s emotions to humans. The problem was a little confused and hard to understand.

So I think sometimes when designing, the understanding of the requirement is also very important. Combined with our own understanding, we designed a translation app for the owner to translate the humans’ words to what cats can understand and vice versa.

In the end, we shared our ideas and designed products with other groups. It’s interesting to see others’ ideas and projects and easy to say “wow, it can be designed in that way!”

This is written by both Jamie and me. 

Gamers, when they are gaming, it’s critical for them to be aware of the conditions of their computers, which may drastically influence their gaming performances. Changes in CPU temperature and ping speed which would affect the frame count of the game may lead to different gaming decisions. In a traditional gaming interface, the data of CPU temperature and ping speed is usually written in the top-left corner, which is nearly impossible for a gamer to notice when he is fully involved in a game. Therefore, we decide to design an attached pad that reports live data in the form of color changing with other functions as well.

Jamie photoshopped this WatchPad prototype and the color range it would cover.

Watchpad is a product that can stand next to your screen while gaming. After plugging into your pc, the screen is automatically turned on, it consists of only two pages, one is for displaying simple information including date, memos, some photos. The other page is the gaming mode page which only has two sections: the upper part detects the ping speed which would affect the fps; the lower part displays the CPU temperature. Both sections will have specific data within the section, but more importantly, both indexes are also implied through color changes. Red and blue are the two colors that contrast greatly and would be an apparent alarm for the gamer. We design the red as the danger zone and the blue as the normal zone. For ping speed, the redder the section gets, the slower your net speed is; for CPU temperature, the redder, the hotter. WatchPad is designed to be constantly muted so that there won’t be noises that may affect the gamer.

For laptop users, since laptop lacks advanced cooling system, most laptop gamers purchase extra fans that are placed under the laptop to cool down the system, because of the noise the fans make, they are not always on and the player has to manually switch them on. Therefore, our WatchPad has an additional cable that can be linked to the external fans, when the CPU temperature reaches a certain level, WatchPad will automatically switch on the fans and switch them off when the temperature goes down.

Our inspiration comes from a friend who is a professional gamer in Overwatch. He complains about the trouble he encounters when gaming and we hope to solve this problem with our design. It should be categorized as an enchanted object since it is an upgrade for traditional gaming equipment. It fulfills the responsible design agenda as for solving a problem for gamers and achieves the problem-solving goal.

We watched the video of Rudi. We found that he faced several problems about mobile phones in his daily life. He thought he spent too much time on it and hence wasted his time to accompany with family and do his works.

So my group partners and I designed an app for Rudi.  There are four stages of this app. The first one is a warning. When Rudi has used his mobile phone for a bit long time. The second one is that the phone will get hotter. The third one is that the phone needs more time to reaction and the final stage is shutting down.

These are all aimed to warn Rudi that he is using his mobile phone for a long time and need to rest for a while or put down it.

I remembered that one professor raised a question that what if the second stage happens when Rudi is on the subway and when the phone is hot, he can put the phone on the table and continue using it.

This workshop helps me have a propaedeutic command of design. It is designed for the users and should combine appearance and functions.