This workshop was a new experience for me. We make our customers cats, which means we are designing products for cats. We started by thinking about what are some problems cats are facing. In my group, we thought about communications, especially for home cats who are taken care of by their human owners. Those cats can’t communicate with their owners, even though there are daily feeding routines, they might be hungry at times or wanting companies or getting bathed.
After writing down this question, we were asked to switch to another desk to solve the problem others raised about cats. The problem to be solved was to reduce the number of stray cats. Originally we could only think of shelters, but then we expand our sights by thinking what actually happens to stray cats since there are already animal shelters and building more of them isn’t a possible solution for our society. We turned to the stray cats who often live in parking lots. Those cats are easily run over by cars since they always hide on the tires, under the car body and is not easily spotted by car owners. Therefore, we designed a monitoring system that can monitor if there are obstacles under the car, or between the car body with the tire.
Finally, we switched to the third table to prototype the solution raised by the former group, they thought of a cat feeding machine that wouldn’t need to be cleaned often. We decided that the reason for owners having to keep washing the food bowl is because of the saliva stuck on the bowl. We started to sculpt our cat feeding machine that has the food bowl on the top of the water bowl, the food bowl has tiny holes on the wall that allows the saliva leaks through the wall into the water bowl, this design allows the owner to only wash the water bowl and will vastly reduce the washing times.