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!”