In this workshop, we go through a very interesting design process by designing and prototyping each other’s idea. The clients for whom we are designing is cats. The problem we planned to solve was to design a product that can help communication between cats and their owners. Personally, I agree that it is a very hard idea. When I was trying to think of what I would do for this project, I thought that we can train the cats to use color to convey their thoughts, such as whether they are hungry, tired, sad or happy.
After that, the problem we were trying to solve was to keep cats warm and fed. We first further restrict the problem to stray cats because these cats need to get warm and fed the most. Then, we emphasized with the stray cats and realized that most of them tend to hide under a car to get warmer. Therefore, we designed a device that can be equipped in a car to warm the cat when it senses that there is a cat there. Meanwhile, it solves the problem of car owners accidentally having their cars run over the cats by signaling there is a cat. Personally, I think this is a brilliant design because we are actually emphasizing with the cat and solve the problem with the enchanted object framework.
At last, the product we were prototyping was an automatic food cleaner for a cat. The design was that it would somehow separate the dry food and the wet food and clean the residue of wet food automatically. I think it was a practical design, but I feel that the design is too common. By researching, there are many similar products already. Meanwhile, the prototype we made looked quite strange, which might have some risk of intimidating the cats.