For my group project, we designed a product called “Connect” which allows social event organizers to have a new way to connect and get people to socialize through a LED bracelet which light they can control and symbolize.
Overall, this project definitely helped me to understand and approach the design process. Often when I come up with a project to tackle, I tend to have a lot of ideas which tend to be scattered and lack coherence. Designing a product which has a certain purpose or goal felt like an exercise to help me narrow down a focus and isolate and mold ideas into a way that made sense. When we discussed about our product, it was difficult to find focus; but after talking to Leon about our design, one piece of advice that heavily stood out to me that he gave (which has completely reoriented me to how I approach design) was contextualizing your product. Narrowing your product into a very particular scenario really helps form the product you want to design and reinforce why you pick certain design choices.
With this context in mind, designing the bracelet was really balancing out the feasibility and the design frameworks we had to work with. The original idea was to 3D print the prototype, but I ran into so many problems with the 3D printer (7 attempts) that I ended up using the 3D printer in the Fabrication Lab which took 2+ hours of waiting. Not only that, just wearing the test print was too uncomfortable and the fact I couldn’t choose the color of the filament for 3D printing already defeated the intention of the sleek black design, so I opt out by using fabric that matched the aesthetic choices we wanted and was also comfortable. It also made it easier to create 2 bracelets without having to wait unnecessary amount of time. It also helped orient the LED light into focus and be the centerpiece of the product — as well as easily incorporate the LED and 3V battery to the bracelet!
This assignment really helped reorganize the way I approach conceptualizing projects and how to design with purpose. It also reinforced the idea that design can bridge the boundaries of our regular way of navigating through the world and allow us to explore experiences we otherwise wouldn’t have experienced if we didn’t design a certain product, building, city, etc. in a certain way. It was definitely a learning experience yet also interesting to see how we can design new products by mixing up different frameworks that don’t necessarily fit with one another.