Digital Lifestyle products : Personal Accessories

The objective was to explore possibilities of Digital Lifestyle Products, “Fusion Products”. i.e. Designing traditional personal accessories like purses, eye ware, bracelets, pendants, earrings, belts having digital layer inside them to enhance them in terms of :

Form

Style

Emotion

Expression

Functionality

Intelligence.

The Project involved multiple disciplines of design combining Interaction Design along with Fashion and Product Design.

The output of this project is a set of accessories designed for social communication at “touch and feel” emotional level which includes :

Emotional communication device for Lovers and

Emotional communication device for working parents and lonely child.

The devices are based on sustainable features of jewellery and wearable computing from the point of view of social acceptance, future computing and human relationships.

Assistance and control system for Polyhouse plantation

The aim of this project is to provide a device which would assist farmers in carrying out complex everyday tasks involved in Polyhouse Farming, assist them in monitoring, irrigating, fertilizing, planning and maintaining the crops, as well as providing assistance and backbone support in case of emergency situations.

The system includes multiple modules of EC-pH-Temp-Humidity measurement placed throughout the Polyhouse and a mobile PDA to which it communicates the environment information. This Mobile PDA software is aimed at helping the farmers with less experience and no professional agriculture education to undertake complex hi-tech crop production, ‘plan, plant and cultivate' high profit oriented crops inside a Polyhouse, which provides controlled environment to assure good quality and productivity of the crop.

Project involved exploring Polyhouse plantation process, problems faced by farmers, conceptualizing system for assistance, conceptualizing individual elements of the system, designing detailed interface and interaction of the independent devices, styling and form design.

The interface is designed in regional (here MARATHI) language. It is designed after thoroughly studying the education, literacy and understanding level of farmers. The assistance system is designed in such a way that it not only tell farmers the problem but also tells them about actual actions to be taken in terms of the tools to be used, the quantitative information, actual steps to be taken to solve the problem. Thus PROCESSED information is given to farmers, which is ready to use and farmers don't have to apply their skills to modify the information for using. It is easy to learn, intuitive and based on INVERTED PYRAMID approach for interface design. The functions are easy to find, navigate, operate and information is pushed upward in visual hierarchy, so that it is accessed within lowest number of keystrokes. Prioritization of functions in terms of frequency of use & emergency is done. Use of appropriate visual language and optimum use of screen size is done in order to accumulate all the information in the small display without clutter and complexity.

Overlap in SE and IxD

Software Engineering and Interaction Design, both strive towards developing useful and usable computing systems. There are boundary objects and boundary methods that fall into both the fields but are known with different connotations. The aim of the project is to identify the boundary objects, boundary techniques and to come up with possible solutions for bridging the gaps between the two fields and to suggest inputs for course of Interaction Design in IDC, IIT Bombay. The project concluded with a workshop ‘HCI-SE Overlap 1' on 12th Feb 2005 at IDC, IIT Bombay, with call for case studies and papers from practitioners and professionals based their own experiences. The approaches studied for the project include, one of Usability & Software Architecture by Bonnie John and Len Bass from Carnegie Mellon University and the other of Constantine and Lockwood's Usage-centered Design.

At GENESIS Multidesigners, Pune.

Project 1: To Design Point-Of-Sale Display cum Storage unit for PUREHEALTH CO .

Display for 6 tins of PURESOYA PLUS milk additive 200gm pack, which would be given to the retailers as a product promotion activity. The POS display is economical and easy to transport, easy to assemble at retailer's end. Complete structure is in 3mm thick Sunpack (plastic Corrugated). The display acts as a packaging for 6 tins during transportation. The packaging carton unfolds to become display. Thus No extra transportation cost is needed to deliver the display unit.

Project 2: Redesign of soundproof cabinet for 20KV Generator set for SHARP ENGINEERS ( Size 7ft X 3.5ft X 5ft )