Overview

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.