A group consisting of myself and four other students designed a collaborative workspace for people who restore classic cars. We went through three phases of design: 1) Meeting with and getting to know our users and their needs and values. 2) Ideating product ideas and co-designing with our users. 3) Detailed design of a single product.
Our final product is the Gearhead Garage, a place where classic car owners can come together to not just work on their cars, but also display them to other car people and share their passion for car restoration. There are many features of the space that allow them to do these things. First, anyone entering walks into a cafe, rather than a cramped work area. Next, rather than have a closed off parking lot where people can store their cars during the winter, the storage area is integrated with the work area, making such that everyone can always see the cars that other people have worked on.
This specific features were determined through a very specific process. This process was the most important part of this project. There were three primary phases:
1) The focus of this class is to design a product that people actually need, rather than designing a widget that engineers want to make because its cool. Therefore, rather than starting with engineering, we started with people. We went out and meet six of our users, and then distilled what we learned from them into three personas. Finally, we identified opportunity areas, parts of the user experience that we thought we could improve.
2) Once we knew what types of things we could help our users with, we began to ideate solutions to these problems. These were as far fetched as a force field bumper that would protect valuable cars to a toolbox that would stow itself out of the way automatically. Also during this phase we remained focused on the people that we were designing for, so we continued to visit them and get their feedback on our product ideas.
3) The final phase of this project involved the detailed design of the best idea to come out of phase 2. For us, this was the collaborative workspace. We designed the floor-plan, as well as the specific interfaces where our users would interact with each other and the space. We built a product model (see above) and designed a poster and a product brochure.
Our final product is the Gearhead Garage, a place where classic car owners can come together to not just work on their cars, but also display them to other car people and share their passion for car restoration. There are many features of the space that allow them to do these things. First, anyone entering walks into a cafe, rather than a cramped work area. Next, rather than have a closed off parking lot where people can store their cars during the winter, the storage area is integrated with the work area, making such that everyone can always see the cars that other people have worked on.
This specific features were determined through a very specific process. This process was the most important part of this project. There were three primary phases:
1) The focus of this class is to design a product that people actually need, rather than designing a widget that engineers want to make because its cool. Therefore, rather than starting with engineering, we started with people. We went out and meet six of our users, and then distilled what we learned from them into three personas. Finally, we identified opportunity areas, parts of the user experience that we thought we could improve.
2) Once we knew what types of things we could help our users with, we began to ideate solutions to these problems. These were as far fetched as a force field bumper that would protect valuable cars to a toolbox that would stow itself out of the way automatically. Also during this phase we remained focused on the people that we were designing for, so we continued to visit them and get their feedback on our product ideas.
3) The final phase of this project involved the detailed design of the best idea to come out of phase 2. For us, this was the collaborative workspace. We designed the floor-plan, as well as the specific interfaces where our users would interact with each other and the space. We built a product model (see above) and designed a poster and a product brochure.
