Bucket list -CHECK
Hi , I’m Pragya Goenka, a II year Industrial Design student from National Institute of Design . So, this is a summary of my past few blogs documenting my design process for Simple Product Design , under the guidance of , our mentor Mr. Kuntal De.
My product of choice was a bucket. The first thing we did to our products was to explore it’s contexts . From that we have to pick a context to work on .My product’s context was household .
Next we wee on to writing our design brief. After playing some rounds of jumble words I landed on my initial design brief.
Next we came up with a activity flowchart or task analysis for our product. And asked questions on every stage.
After all the talks , it was time for digging, yes I’m talking about RESEARCH. Here is a small history on bucket. (Although I haven’t included it’s alternate use here)
Now we expanded our area of research from the bucket to something like bucket, basically Parallel Product search.
Even the map is lost without a destination, so I decided a research goal for my research so as to avoid too much information.Here is a short summary of my research, throughout the project and is been carried out parallely as needed.
Enough about the product what about the user . It was time to develop an user profile to understand the product better. To ask some questions from the user’s perspective we need to understand user first.
Getting to know our user allowed us to understand the problems faced by them using the product . Hence , it was time to develop features of our products.
It was time for some concept development now. here are some of my concepts.
For the final concepts , we built some sketch models and started detailling them.
Here is the final concepts.
CONCEPT 1
FEATURES:
- Reduces the effort of lifting and carrying water over small and large distances, load is distributed adequately with major load carried by lower back
- Works with all commonly used vessels (like matka and baltis/buckets) with different calibrations
- Adjustable to your body and the vessel
- Easy to mass manufacture with existing set up in India
- Can be used to hang vessels in house thus creating vertical space for storage
- Low cost
MATERIAL: NYLON 6/6 AND POLYPROPYLENE
CONCEPT 2
FEATURES
- Collapsible so easy to store after the chore
- Portable
- Easy to mass manufacture
- Aesthetics inspired from a whirlpool
- Low cost
MATERIAL: POLYPROPYLENE AND SILICON
MY TAKE AWAY
We all have heard , read and know that design process is non linear.
Yes it has different stages but there are not necessarily after one another . Popularly represented by the double diamond method , although correct I fet it is highly simplified. For me design process is more like a spiral , you start from a point and keep doing the same process again and again until your resources (time ,money etc.)run out .
What? you thought you will reach a satisfactory solution ? Tell me if any industrial designer in history has ever have reached satisfaction. This is the lesson number 2. no matter what wonder you do , there can never be a perfect product, so as designers we will never be satisfied, we are not suppose to .So for now I’m just learning to be happily dissatisfied. For every gap we fill, we create a new one.
This bring us to our third lesson, world is nothing but just a huge system of small interconnected systems. and our product is a part of this system . On macro level , any change in the the product will create ripples in the whole system, filling some gaps while creating new ones. On the other hand , the product is a system in itself , how different parts come together to fulfill a task, any adjustment to one part will require adjustments to the others.
This design process,I saw beyond the glamorous renders and sketches , and laborious work of Industrial design. Due to the social media , we build this glamorous image of Industrial design with those realistic 3d model, beautiful renders and energetic sketches, although important these are futile without the actual thought, sensitivity and practicality of the idea.
IDEA !another bubble burst for me . Idea in design is not about the eureka moment, there is no eureka moment . Design is about research , a lot of data , a lot of analysis and a lot of explorations. Design is about the exhaustive study .You are suppose to vomit out ideas until there is nothing left in your head , until you exhaust your whole mental library and go beyond .
ROAD AHEAD
There is a lot of work yet to be done , but thanks to our little setback due to the pandemic, prototyping is postponed for now. Yet the work will be continued , as design is an never ending cycle , there is no perfect product . A product never exists in isolation , it is always a part of a system and any change in the product will create ripples in the whole system filling gaps at some places and creating new ones somewhere new,so the blog will be updated soon.
For further details you can visit my profile .
