Understanding how families plan and organize is an essential aspect. No family or individual plans the same way. Harmony achieves the goal through a series of connected personal devices that guide the family together for both shared activities and teaming up when taking care of daily chores in the home. Harmony encourages to bond by spending time together.
We believe that smart technologies might neglect the social aspects of planning some day. Therefore we designed a way of planning and organizing that restores the human touch. Technology is making people more isolated and distant. The key to solving this problem is to bring them back together with the help of interactive and engaging products.
Understanding how families plan and organize is an essential aspect. No family or individual plans the same way. Harmony achieves the goal through a series of connected personal devices that guide the family together for both shared activities and teaming up when taking care of daily chores in the home. Harmony encourages to bond by spending time together.
Harmony was created in close collaboration with other designers in a confined sandbox environment. The IoT Sandbox is a design tool that helps to explore interactions between products in the same IoT environment. These products should together form a network of products that can grow as functionality and the number of products increases. This way new alternatives for systems of connected products can be explored to explore products viable for the future.
This design case focussed on designing an engaging experience to organize and synchronize activities within and around the home for its inhabitant family. A family of products was designed to accommodate the users’ specific needs for planning activities.
Harmony was created in close collaboration with other designers in a confined sandbox environment. The IoT Sandbox is a design tool that helps to explore interactions between products in the same IoT environment. These products should together form a network of products that can grow as functionality and the number of products increases. This way new alternatives for systems of connected products can be explored to explore products viable for the future.
This design case focussed on designing an engaging experience to organize and synchronize activities within and around the home for its inhabitant family. A family of products was designed to accommodate the users’ specific needs for planning activities.
A highly iterative process was used to explore complexity that arises when smart systems integrate with the social aspects of our daily lives. Special considerations must be taken into account when designing for this combination of technical and social aspects.
The pressure cooker is a design sprint exercise used to kickstart the project. With limited time and resources, the designers are forced to switch to an active state of doing. Making quick scenarios and prototypes that help with grasping the complexity of the design. The pressure cooker was used to explore the traditional ways that people organizing and synchronizing activities with a futuristic mindset.
An iterative design method was used to explore the possibilities. After multiple iterations, it was decided to settle for the compass concept. The concept looks at moving people around within the house by guiding them to “events” using a personal “compass”. The framing for this perspective on the design case was to create “a happy home” defined as a clean and tidy home occupied by a family with a strong family bond. The compass is an effort to create a high-tech future that is social.
Two types of user tests were executed. One usability test to clarify which level of abstraction level of planning was preferred by users. Ranging from planning in a traditional way to exploring possibilities where family members do things together entirely based on opportunities that arise in the moment. And one test where a more robust prototype was deployed and used in a family home functioning as a ‘cultural probe’. Giving direct insights about daily use.
With the insights gained from the user testing and prototyping, a final functioning prototype was made. The prototype runs on an ESP32 the together with other components, like an accelerometer, fits inside the 3D-printed shell. Only an external battery was used to power the prototype.
The prototype was used as a demonstrator to showcase the project and potential high-tech future. It could connect to the OOCSI to fetch data and see if there were any tasks available around the house.
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