The Human Factor: Design Thinking

This intro­duc­to­ry class helped me under­stand the phys­i­cal and emo­tion­al human fac­tors that need to be con­sid­ered with every design project — from ergonom­ics and usabil­i­ty to light­ing and col­or. Com­ing from a graph­ic design back­ground, the phys­i­cal fac­tors were espe­cial­ly new to me. I learned how to find and use anthro­po­met­ric data as well as dimen­sions for inte­ri­or spaces to com­plete sev­er­al dif­fer­ent projects. These projects helped pre­pare me for the more pro­found design prob­lems I would come across in lat­er class­es.

Cardboard Chair

The objec­tive of this assign­ment was to cre­ate a chair out of card­board and glue that could hold the weight of our pro­fes­sor. The chair also need­ed to be com­fort­able for every stu­dent in the class, from the small­est female to the tallest male. Each team mem­ber sketched 10 chair designs and the class decid­ed which design each group would have to build. My team­mate Sean Bender’s design was cho­sen for our group, and we had less than one week to com­plete the project.

I found a dia­gram for the “ide­al easy chair seat pro­file for min­i­mum sub­jec­tive com­plaints” in the book Body­s­pace. We adjust­ed our design to include this pro­file for com­fort.

The three of us all par­tic­i­pat­ed in the con­struc­tion of the chair, and I cre­at­ed the adver­tise­ment for our group. Our chair was a suc­cess and held the weight of every per­son who sat in it.

Graduate Space Redesign

For this project, our objec­tive was to redesign the grad­u­ate space in Gulf­stream Cen­ter for Indus­tri­al Design. Our group col­lect­ed data from stu­dent sur­veys in order to find out how the cur­rent space was meet­ing user needs and what needs were not yet being addressed.

After eval­u­at­ing our sur­vey results, we decid­ed to divide the grad­u­ate space into five sec­tions. Each space would meet a dif­fer­ent stu­dent usage need. The cur­rent space was com­plete­ly open, and there were many com­plaints about dis­trac­tions from all the dif­fer­ent types of activ­i­ties going on. Grad­u­ate stu­dents were also lack­ing any per­son­al stor­age space.

We designed a new floor plan to meet these needs, then we start­ed plan­ning what col­ors and fur­ni­ture we would use. We took anthro­po­met­ric data and ADA Stan­dards for Acces­si­ble Design into con­sid­er­a­tion, and we cre­at­ed zone ele­va­tions to dis­play the prop­er mea­sure­ments. We cre­at­ed an archi­tec­tur­al mod­el, a pre­sen­ta­tion board and a mate­ri­als board to go along with our pre­sen­ta­tion.