Overview
In the first session, we had to come up with an
idea for a product that already existed and re-market it towards the younger
generation, we brainstormed and came up with a few ideas of what we could do.
Some of the ideas that we came up with were a multifunctional briefcase that
could store all a person's electronics and even charge them up while they're in
the case, this was our best idea at the time so we started to focus on this.
Another idea was an educational trading card game
which helped kids in areas they were struggling with in school. We decided to
leave this idea because it was too complicated and it only focused on a small
target audience and we wanted to focus on a wider range of people. We also
wanted to see if we could target the health and fitness range because that's
what a lot of people are getting into now, but after doing research there
wasn't anything we could contribute that hadn't been made already. We were
disappointed by this because it had the wide target audience that we were
looking for. Then one of my course mates came up with
the idea of having a multimedia chair that specifically targets designers but
can also be used by others in their chosen subject if they wanted to. I
immediately thought that this was by far the best idea that we had come up with
and we started to do some research on it to see if there was anything else like
it out there. When we found out that there wasn't we knew that this was the
product that would be best for us.
Once we had decided that to design a
multimedia chair was the way forward we started to research the different types
of chair designs that we could use. My personal favourite was the 10 downing
street guards chair because it was designed in a way that it looked like the
chair wrapped around you almost as if you were in your own world and nobody
could disturb you. My course mates pointed out the problem that if we had 10 or
12 of those chairs in the classroom only people in the front would be able to
see. The chair would also be very heavy and it would be able to be move to
classroom to classroom very easily. I spent too much time researching this
chair design because at the time I thought it was the way we needed to go, if I
was to go back and do this task again I would not spend so much time looking at
one chair design because it cost us time that we needed at the end. The
features that we want to include in our chair are very important because they
are the focus of the chair, originally we wanted to include a lot of features
but I suggested that the chair would become crowded if we had to many things on
it so we decided to limit the number of things we put on the chair.
Another important thing that came to
our attention is the material that needed to be used on the chair. The material
needs to be durable and comfortable for people who will be using it for long
periods of time. We looked in what material would be best in great depth and it
took us about 2 weeks to narrow down our options after doing research on each
material. At the end of this session we branched out and started researching
different aspects of the chair, we would decide what we each needed to research
at the end of the sessions and report back on what we found at the start of the
next session. Looking back 2 weeks was far too long to spend looking at what
materials would be best to use for the product, we should have spent 1-2 days’ maximum
on this and used the time that we would have had one something that needed more
time for us to complete.
How we were going to market the product
was something that we felt that was very important because it was how we were
going to get our product across to potential suitors. I was given the task at
choosing and breaking down three adverts to see how companies market their
products to everyday people. The adverts that I chose were the IPad pro, Google
Pixel C and an x-rocker gaming chair. I spent about 2-3 days on this because I
wanted to make sure that I got all the techniques that these big companies were
using so we could get across to our target audience by using them, they would
also make our ad and us look more professional. One of the other people in the
group also made a handout flyer which we could use for advertisement, in my
opinion I thought that this was a waste of time because nobody uses paper
flyers anymore and the time spend on that could have been used better on
another aspect of the project.
We then moved onto the actual chair
design itself, we spent a lot of time on this aspect of the project and in my
opinion we should have spent more time on it because it was arguably the most
important aspect of the project. If I was to go back and do the project again I
would spend less time on research and more time working on different concept
designs because we can load and loads of research but if we don’t have
something to show for all the research that we have done, then it has all gone
to waste. We only came up with two or three different concept designs when in
hindsight we should have come up with a lot more for all the research that we
did. We set a time frame for all of us to do 3 designs and then we would all
meet and take the best parts from all our designs and incorporate them into one
final design that we would work on.
There was still a fair bit that we
needed to do at this point, I was assigned to do a room design that included
our product. The layout of the room had to be based on flip learning so one of
the other group members researched into flip learning and then showed me what
he had found out so I could take that into account when designing the room. We
also took a trip to go and see a flip learning classroom so I could get an idea
of how to set the classroom up when designing it. We spent about 2 days on this
part of the project which was plenty of time to get the design and the research
done. I also had to do a room layout of the room that we were redesigning which
I had to take measurements for so I could make an accurate design.
Then we had to create the pitch where
we would show off our product and everything we had done for the project; we
spend a long time doing this because we wanted to make sure that it was just
right because we had put a lot of time and effort into this project and we didn’t
want to mess it up at the last hurdle. We divided the pitch up into sections so
we would each talk about three topics each with the pitch lasting ten minutes
in total.
Overall I have enjoyed doing this
project but if I was to do it again I would do a few things differently. I
would not spend as much time as we did on research, I think that was one of our
major downfalls because we should have spent more time designing and improving
our product then going back to do more research after we had a few concept
ideas down, because we did this I felt that it let us down in the presentation
because we didn’t have enough visuals to show and to many details to talk about
which made the presentation drag on. The visuals that we did have were not up
to the standard that they could have been if we kept going back and improving
the designs. That was the only part of the project that we needed to improve
drastically on if we were to do it again because I felt that everything else
went well, we had weekly meetings where we would set tasks for the following week
and everyone would always do what they were required to do it’s just the design
aspect that let us down.
I felt that my overall performance in this project was of a high standard, I worked well in a team with my other course mates and every task that I was assigned to do I completed to the best of my ability. Any changes that I needed to make I did so quickly so the group didn't fall behind. If I was to go back and do this project again I would spend a lot more time on the design aspect of the product, that's where I felt let me down. I was so focused on doing the research and when it came to do the design work I didn't leave myself enough time to create multiple concepts of our product, which I could have improved on as the project progressed and new ideas came to mind instead of rushing and doing a final design in the last week and a half.
