Designing for responsible innovation that engages consumers as participants in sustainable practices.
Consumers might be the most underutilized resource in current developments for responsible production and consumption. Leading companies are working hard to mitigate environmental costs by employing sustainable practices — or try to offset them by planting trees and buying CO2 certificates. In contrast, while most consumers want to act more sustainably, their role is limited to choosing the right products and throwing things into the right bin. When designing sustainable solutions, we need to create experiences that engage users as active participants in sustainability practices. The social effects…
‘Human-centered’ design, as currently practiced, is problematic. For the convenience and delight of the ‘user,’ we create products that are cheap and desirable but create environmental and social damage through their production, service, and after-life. To support these consumption patterns, we have moved from participating in the global ecosystem into an age of human domination: the Anthropocene. This ‘Age of the Human’ calls us into a position of responsibility. Scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries (graphic below) beyond which lies irreparable impact with unknown consequences. Moving forward, we need to create a balanced symbiotic relationship between human activities and our…
Prototyping for innovation in early product design stages
— or: how we learned to love shitty prototypes.
A prototype is not just a demo of a future product, it’s a tool that helps you understand and define what a future product could and should be. Prototypes are usually used to refine a selected concept, but at Above we found prototyping invaluable earlier in the design process. In this article, we will talk about what we learned about when, what, and how to prototype in early design stages for physical products.
Prototype to explore, not just to validate!
The traditional design process goes through diverging and converging activities…
The Power Glove was Nintendo’s first foray into motion-controlled gaming. But the product produced by Mattel was ahead of its time; gaming systems of the early 90s were not able to render 3D graphics or even accommodate analog control inputs. In the current era of AR/VR development, the Power Glove’s true potential is showcased by other, modern VR glove products. However, none of these products have the same “retro-cool” factor, and with used Power Gloves available cheaply on eBay they provide a readymade DIY solution for VR hand tracking. …
We have been working on connected and autonomous car projects at TEAGUE for a while now. We have found it to be indispensable to use physical prototypes to test our designs with users.
This is a Teague Labs post. For an interactive version of the article, view the original article.
Yesterday we had a somewhat silly idea and since we had an afternoon of open time, we went ahead and made it. The inspiration came from ustwo’s mouth off app which uses sound reactivity to animate a mouth. We’ve been working on VR content quite a bit recently and thought it would be interesting to do something similar for the area usually covered by a VR headset.
Putting a(nother) phone with large eyes on the front of your VR headset was the obvious…
Light bulbs have been the first significant step many people and companies have taken into the connected home. Moving forward, connected light bulbs might not only provide light; they are also perfectly positioned to host microphones, cameras, speakers, or other technologies without adding new wiring or other infrastructure.
However, turning LED light bulbs with an expected lifespan of up to 20 years into a gadget also creates risks. Gadgets have much shorter life expectancies, not because the devices break, but because digital technologies are updated yearly and existing products become outmoded quickly. …
Every evening I plug my phone into the charger and set my alarm for the next morning. I could keep doing it this way, but I thought there should be a more elegant way that combines these two activities. So we prototyped a connected inductive charging dock.
Putting the phone on the bedside charger in the evening opens an alarm interface with a proposed wake-up time. Sliding the phone horizontally lets one tweak the proposed alarm time. …
We made a lamp. Why?
For one, we like making things — sometimes just for the sake of making things. But this lamp was made to explore one of the many connected home hypotheses we’ve been wrestling with lately. Specifically, we wanted to address the unnecessarily large gap that exists between interacting with a connected product via its physical affordances and interacting with it via a mobile app. We’ve found ourselves hunting through an app to manipulate a nearby lamp and we think that’s silly.
Because we believe the design of all beloved products — for the connected home or…
Felix Heibeck
Hardware Interface Designer
