Project overview

Context

This project was developed as part of TU Delft's Joint Master Program (JMP) in which students collaborate as a closed team to work on a solution for a client while covering all three of TU Delft's Design Master disciplines Strategic Product-, Integrated Product-, and Interaction Design.

Nokia was won as a partner for this project based on the team's own preference and personal inquiry as the TU Delft commonly does not assign client partners for this program.

The resulting case study has been carefully researched and developed by taking the crucial aspects of user-centered design, business strategy and production planning into account and documented for the client in form of a report plus a concept video.
Team
Our international team consisted of these great people:
- Santiago De Francisco (Colombia) - Design for Interaction
- Youge Xiao (China) - Integrated Product Design
- Suwen Shen (China) - Integrated Product Design
- Karan Shah (India) - Strategic Product Design
- Eric Ringard (Germany) - Design for Interaction
- Andrei Ganci (Rumania) - Strategic Product Design
contribution

Due to the nature of this shared interdisciplinary project, every team member was collaborating closely and involved in almost all tasks and decisions throughout the process. This enabled everybody to learn a lot about key factors that go beyond one's own specific study program and also inspire each other with personal working methods and processes. Hence the project's results were obviously shaped by everyone's influence.

My personal focus and contributions covered the following points:
• qualitative and quantitative design research
• active ideation and concept development
• creating quick prototypes and paper mockups
• wireframing and designing the user experience
• creating the user interfaces and mobile prototype
• acting (badly) in the concept movie
• final presentation

This concept is the result of an interdisciplinary student research and design project during the TU Delft's Industrial Design Master program in collaboration with Nokia.

Our process started with the following design goal:

Color-coded sorting and clustering of information for a faster analysis

We soon came to realize how easy it was to get lost in the vast amount of information we had gathered from our participants. After initial struggles, we managed to cut our tedious analysis into manageable clusters and save valuable time by using simple mapping techniques which also enabled us to already generate first ideas along the way.

Evaluating and expanding our ideas with a scientific framework

Parallel to the user research, the another part of the time focussed on desk researching the context of our set design goal. These efforts revealed a framework which helped us to systematically assess our findings and focus on the aspects which overlapped with our user's needs the most.

As we translated our combined insights into our context, we realized that our key values evolved around the following factors:

The more we played with these values, the more it occurred to us that possibly the best way of introducing them effectively into the professional organizational context is by turning them into an actionable currency that people can easily share and interact with.

Diving into a fast-paced design process

With the initial groundwork and direction having been laid down, a quickly iterative and intentionally hands-on creative sequence was kicked off.
This enabled the team to move rapidly based on constructing and testing out ideas using common interaction design methods.

Crafting scenarios into interfaces

As soon as the concept had been framed into solid user stories, the efforts were set on designing a concise user interface that would cover all of our intended interaction scenarios aiming to positively affect our user's context.

Creating the product hardware models and concept movie

While the digital UI prototype was being made for a mobile UX demonstration, our team's hardware specialists focussed on creating physical mock-ups and models to be used in the final concept video. In the meantime, the remaining part of the team concentrated on creating storyboards and preparing detailed plans for shooting the film footage.

Our Nokia Dots concept consists of a mobile app which is complemented with wirelessly paired Dot devices which expand our product's ranges beyond the digital realm deep into the user's context.
This enables our solution to have a greater impact in active as well as passive user interactions, which contribute to raising awareness and easy engagement towards our key values.

Nokia Dots

fostering empathic work relationships with technology