itaú: transformative transactions

The last project before i started with my master thesis was an individual project in cooperation with the biggest south-american bank, Itaú. The brief asked us to think about the future of banking. We could choose our own focus almost unrestrictedly. That led to a very diverse range of great results in our class. 

I decided to work on the aspect of shared living expenses. It was a choice based on personal experiences, but I received feedback from countless people that supported my ideas.

Here is the result in form of an animation and the abstract.



"Companion is a banking service aligned with the special needs of shared living communities.
A lot of people live in shared flats as it offers numerous benefits. Even though the motivation to move into a shared flat is as different as the people who live in them, it is apparent that sharing goods supports a good atmosphere and vice versa. Companion supports this reciprocity by providing a flexible solution every shared living community can adapt to their needs.

The service consists of a bank-account, a web- and a mobile application and physical tokens, the companions themselves. The bank account can be used to collect monthly contributions to do regular payments like rent, electricity and internet and to save money for other shared expenses.
Each tenant owns one companion, that is recognizable by a color
chosen before. The companions visualize the shared flats financial situation in a simplified way: If there are debts amongst the flatmates, if one tenant is very successful in saving money for the community or if the shared accounts balance is growing or getting smaller.

As the companions are placed in the shared space of a flat, they become a part of everyday life, supporting the sharing and saving behavior by using the rules the tenants agreed upon."

I got a lot of insights from a workshop i conducted at UID. 12 people from the Interaction-, Advanced Product- and Transportation Design program shared their ideas and experiences they had on my project.

One personal goal I set for myself was building an experiential prototype that is as close as possible to the final products physical appearance. Using an Arduino Mini Pro, the TexasInstruments TLC5940 LED driver and an "optimized" breadboard layout made it possible to achieve that goal.

The prototype was part of an exhibition at school. The next step would have been fitting the technical components into the product design i did for the project.

Avaya workshop

After our experience prototyping course, we had a one-week workshop together with Avaya. We helped them to find some solutions on the future of remote-collaboration and office communication.

One part of the brief was creating a physical device. I focused on trying not to add any unnecessary things to the office desk, but using the existing environment and tools.

It was a quick ideation exercise that resulted in pretty diverse results in our class. I did a small animation you can find below.

free universal construction kit

Stumbled upon this today:

A kit that enables the assembly of different construction/system toys like lego / fischertechnik / knex etc. I think i dreamt of that a long time..

industrial sound design

A little bit late, but I still want to show the result of the 2-week industrial-sound-design class we finished two weeks ago. My classmate Siri (Swedish) and me collaborated with Dawid (Swedish) and Robert (Dutch) from the product design master programme. 

Our brief was to create some product solution where a combination of sound and light serves as the innovative feature. We decided to work on with bicycles / traffic which was one of the topics to chose from.

After some first brainstorm sessions we focused on the aspects of awareness and navigation as they seemed to be the most relevant to be indicated. We thought about what would be the things which are important to indicate and how that indication could happen, ending up with a solution that used the handlebar-grips as light and headphones (optionally integrated speakers). One of the main concepts was to use directed sound on the left or right ear to arouse attention having a light signal on the respective side. The main task was to design suitable sound and light signals to express the events we chose to be the most relevant.

The grips have integrated LED's and connect to your smartphone via Bluetooth. The actual 'brainwork' is done by an application on the smartphone, so the options to use the product are not limited to what we showed up and can be open-source (e.g. numerous location based service are imaginable).

As we didn't want the product to be overloaded with features, we limited it on

1. An indication that the system is active
2. A warning signal (red) if cars approach from the backside (left or right) indicated by a light and sound signal that changes in pitch and frequency depending on how fast and how close a car is
3. A warning signal that indicates that a dangerous spot is ahead
4. An indication to turn left or right
5. An indication that a destination is reached

To make the idea a little bit more clear we created a simple mock-up using an Arduino-board and some prototyping magic (Processing code with minim-audio library) to do some 'Wizard-Of-Oz' it with some potential users. (see video down below)

It was fun to see the reactions :)  We pre-recorded some footage while riding the bike to simulate what was happening in traffic and showed on the bicycle prototype itself how the product would work. People using the 'bike' started to act out if the could control the video and reacted when there were indications...

For the presentation we did a short animation to explain the concept a bit better...

It was an intense but super funny project and we learned a lot. The collaboration with the product design guys was great (as Siri and me both have an industrial design background we sort of understood their language) and led to a very nice result everybody was happy with, still leaving a lot of open questions if it would come to a further development (e.g. what happens in a super-busy traffic like in a US downtown district?) But that was a bit too much to consider in two weeks...

Some product designs from UID

It's been a while but I still wanted to share some of the results of the product design master students. They had a project in cooperation with a mining company and did some nice, proper industrial designs. I think ID will never loose its appeal to me!