The Brief: put yourself in unfamilar shoes, design and develop a product/service to enrich someone's daily life

Research

Touchpoint

  • This brief aims to break through our preconceptions when it comes to design. Often times, designers slip into the trap of producing ideas based off their own lived experiences, hence designing for themselves! 

  • It is paramount that we acknowledge this bias and research broadly, acting as the pillars to overcome the gaps our societal thinking

  • Our client is a 25 year old man from Turkmenistan, vastly different to what we are familiar with

  • The most prominent problem area we identified is lack of potable water, this will be the focus of our ideation

 

Ideation

Touchpoint

  • We used lots of new ideation techniques, the main one being to not kill off ideas before it reaches the paper! You never know where a thought may lead, everything must make it onto the paper. From here, word accosiation can be used to re-jig said ideas!
  • The idea we are pursuing is one of my own. The premise being a solar desalination unit which uses a simple gear mechanism to track the sun
  • This idea has the potential of being effcient at removing salt from water, while also being electricity free and easy to repair for rural areas

 

Diverge with the selected idea

The Final Result

Conclusions and Forecast

I have found this brief to be incredibly useful at developing my research skills, ideation techniques and forcing me to not design based solely on my own experiences. 

These facts will undoubtedly contribute towards making me a more useful, reliable and insightful designer.