Hasta La Ideas

The word “protestor” probably brings a few images to mind: a hazy scene of conflict, throngs of angry bystanders with politically charged signs and the police. While creative repurposing tends to trump product design when it comes to civil unrest, a class at the School of Visual Arts was recently tasked with designing for protest culture in a class called “Product, Brand and Experience,” for which the subtitle is the brief: “Consumer Products for Protestors.” [Disclosure: Core77 partner and Editor-at-Large Allan Chochinov is the Chair of the Products of Design Program.]

Damon Ahola and Richard Clarkson were among the students who took the class last semester, teaming up to design B. Super—a collection of transformative tools (including a utility belt) that transform the wearer/user into a superhero in minutes. See what they had to say about their experience and the product series they created:

Core77: Was there an “a-ha moment” that resulted in the idea for this series of products?

Damon Ahola & Richard Clarkson: We were discussing possible brand values and product directions early on in the process, Richard introduced the idea of superheroes. He was exploring the concept of superpowers in his thesis, so he was already quite knowledgeable about the topic. Damon quickly picked up the idea and immediately began sketching product concepts to give protesters a greater sense of confidence.

Could you walk me through the different products and their uses?

Each tool aids the protester in a specific task and is branded as such. The respirator mask,””breath,” assists in surviving airborne toxins. To elude authorities, “disguise” is a fake mustache kit at the ready. Duct tape, handy in any situation, is included as “repair.” “Relieve” is a lemon juice solution applied to allay the sting of pepper spray in the eye. As a mask, “hide” protects the protester’s identity. Embodied as “declare,” a rewritable roll-out canvas and marker act as a necessary communication tool. The single-use items are encased in a reusable box as “revive.” Finally, the starter kit including the belt system and three of the tools is “empower.”

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We’ve all been there—befuddled by the many options the washing machine has to offer and envisioning the possible horrors that could arise with the push of a wrong button. It’s a scenario that’s generally resolved with a quick phone call to mom or a web search. Convinced that there had to be a better way, Peter Fabor, UX designer at Avast Antivirus and founder of The Surf Office, has come up with the straight-forward washing machine design we’ve all been Google searching for.

From digital to dials, there isn’t anything easy about cleaning your clothes the “right way”

After a bit of personal research into the realm of washing machine confusion, Fabor found a fact from the Daily Mail that put his project into motion: “58% of British men can’t use a washing machine properly because they find the household appliance confusing.” Even more, the headline on the Daily Mail’s coverage states that a quarter of British men can’t even mange turning the machine on. I’m sure that statistic reaches much further than the British—I for one have been known to tie-die many white shirts while trying to wash them and I’m an American lady.

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With additional reporting by Erika Rae Owen

In 1990, Ian Frazier published a fiction piece in the New Yorker, casting an antagonistic yet universally beloved Looney Tune as the plaintiff of a court case against a corporate entity for its seemingly nonexistent QC standards. No doubt you are already familiar with the laundry list of complaints enumerated in Coyote vs. ACME. Time and again, we took pleasure in witnessing the episodic pratfalls of the pathetic Mr. Coyote (given name Wile), as the nefarious ne’er-do-well nearly obliterated himself on multiple occasions in his attempts to assassinate his long-standing rival, the Road Runner. Each and every time, a dangerous piece of equipment would malfunction at the worst possible moment with suspiciously predictable consistency, rendering the aggrieved as a veritable case study in schadenfreude.

The suit alleges that ACME is at fault, but new evidence suggests otherwise.

Glitches aside, the various instruments of death and gravity-defying wearables employed by Mr. Coyote in the cartoon are much more than mere stretches of the imagination—they are, in fact, prime examples of design fiction. We just didn’t realize it until a designer from Pentagram took a stab at bringing the cartoon to life in a new way for their annual Christmas card.

Unlike the fictional plaintiff, designer Daniel Weil succeeds in his efforts: From the iconic spherical bomb to the more obscure Burmese Tiger Trap, these concepts may be more utilitarian than his previously-seen “Clock for Architects,” but the inner workings of the five ACME products are certainly no less considered.

Click image to enlarge

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Left: A community map with measured dimensions. Right: Iso-metric illustrated version of the community based on reference photos. This was developed to make the map more engaging and fun. Righthand illustration by Boyeon Choi.

In the field of design and technology today, deeply understanding users in their local context is an essential part to the design process. A holistic understanding of users generates empathy and a specificity of experience that enables designers to create valuable solutions for markets, communities and individuals.

In our field work in Uganda’s rural north and Kampala, its capital and largest city, we took the unique opportunity to conduct research, as designers, into informal technology usage from a more complex and discovery-based perspective. Jeff focused on informal electricity bypassing in an urban community in Kampala, and An looked at how youth transfer media files via Bluetooth in northern Uganda. These are the stories that emerged after a hybrid approach of design, ethnography and other research methods to understand the systems and structures in place and build relationships with individuals working and living in these contexts.

In an increasingly globalized world, local contexts matter more than ever before. Rich, deep ethnographic stories can communicate the complex conditions under which communities and individuals make decisions regarding technology use in their everyday lives. These stories in turn inform design decisions around technology development and practical use. As Jessica Weber and John Cheng recently argued in UX Magazine, “Ethnography reveals how digital and physical processes work together to help businesses address gaps and focus on the entire customer experience.”

We present two examples of user stories from our research into informal systems, as well as the visual forms we developed to communicate it. It was essential to use visualization to engage the designers and researchers in a developed, U.S. context to translate the unique characteristics of the informal systems for those who couldn’t experience them firsthand. Visualizing the conditions and the systematic influences at work through user-generated drawings, maps, videos and photographic documentation placed them in context, helping to reframe these stories in a manner that permitted audiences in the United States to make judgments based on local values and their emergent informal usage of technology.

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Testing a new product’s intrigue is tough. As a designer, every one of your products is a masterpiece for one reason or another and it’s hard to get a true take on whether or not it will sell. Upwell Design, a San Francisco based design studio, found the perfect way to test and market their new product, Walhub—by hacking IKEA. We’ve covered stunts similar to this before where people have used IKEA products to create more elaborate (and sometimes better) tools and pieces of furniture.

But Upwell decided to test the market’s interest for their new switch cover/storage space by actually passing their design as an IKEA product. By dressing one of their own as an IKEA employee and adding all of the makings of an IKEA product (price tags, UPC barcodes) to Walhub, they placed the product in its natural environment among IKEA’s designs and let shoppers do the rest. The video below shows the hack in action:

I’d say it was a complete success—even if solely for the confusion in that poor IKEA employee’s voice as he (kind of) realized he wasn’t speaking to a fellow rep.

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