BlueHair: Interaction & Product Design

Tag: Personas

  • Creative Sessions: Playing with serious stuff

    Creative Session photos (11)A creative session is a gathering of people who, following some steps and rules shaped by a facilitator (or organizer), let their creativity loose. Working together, in one or more teams, they eventually generate ideas for the subject matter in question. The session doesn’t need to have very strict guidelines in order to work. As long as it is well organized most likely creativity and inspiration sooner or later emerge (Grudin & Pruitt, 2004).

    I have participated in a couple of creative sessions and always found them extremely useful as a means to let your mind go free and be creative in solving problems or in generating ideas and so I wanted to share with you the process that I followed while organizing one such activity during my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project in which we were dealing with emotions in hotel environments. (more…)

  • From A to Green: A future vision of sustainable coachworks

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    Relevant Keywords:

    Automotive industry, sustainability, Transportation, Delivery, Coachworks, Future scenario

    Design Goal:

    Combigroep Carrosserieën, a Dutch coachworks producer, wants to extend its potential market following the newest regulations, transportation trends and logistics of the European Union having sustainability as a focus. As a group of 6 interdisciplinary designers the project was carried out from the strategy up to the product interaction and product detail level.

    Project duration and team:

    300 hours, 2 Strategic product designers (Stefanus Heru Prabowo, Ricardo Mejia), 3 Integral product designers (Barth Vrijling, Ana Laura Rodrigues Santos, Marjolein van Houten), 1 Interaction designer (David Güiza Caicedo).

    Methods Used:

    • Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project
    • The context of the industry and our clients position within it was researched and analyzed through stakeholder analysis, competitor analysis and PESTE analysis
    • Interviews and role playing user analysis were used to understand our users and personas were used to illustrate them during the design process.
    • Generated future scenarios
    • Creative sessions were performed to generate ideas during the design process.

    (more…)

  • Beerbuddies: Using the personality of cartoon characters to define people’s personalities

    As a part of my Design for Interaction Master’s degree, I took part of a project called Exploring Interactions, for which I was trying to empower bartenders against unwanted behaviour in their bars.

    As a field research, I organized some group interviews with local bartenders and made use of some generative methods (such as collage making) in order to gain more information regarding their context and the interactions involved in their job, specially those regarding the customers and more specifically those involving customers showing some sort of unwanted behaviour. After thorough analysis and fiddling with different ideas, the Beerbuddies were born.

    The BeerBuddies are meant as a tool to reflect the personality and mood of bar-goers through the use of beer coasters with cartoon characters on them. (more…)

  • BeerBuddies: Empowering bartenders against unwanted behaviour

    Discover the BeerBuddies

    Relevant Keywords:

    Work, Leisure, Horeca (Hotels, restaurants, cafes), interaction, evident, explorative, involved, dominant, submissive

    Design Goal:

    To empower bartenders against unwanted behavior. The project was performed for the “Exploring Interactions” course, as part of the Design for Interaction Master of Science at the Delft University of Technology.

    Project duration:

    225 hours

    Methods Used:

    • Context mapping research through group interviews and generative methods (such as collage making) with local bartenders to gain rich visual and contextual information from them (field research).
    • Online survey to assess how people perceive the personalities of cartoon characters in terms of dominance and friendliness.

    (more…)