The Challenge Workshops

Holon Academic Institute of Technology, School of Design

Israel 15-17 November 2005

The Context

The Holon Academic Institute of Technology (HAIT) just outside Tel Aviv focuses on advanced technology and its scientific, professional, social and cultural aspects. The School of Design has three departments: Industrial Design, Interior Design and Visual Communications. The workshop was for 30 third year industrial design students. All had completed military service of up to six years before entering higher education. The three-day workshop aimed to give them a concentrated experience of user-centred research methods culminating in a group design project. The development of their ability to present effectively was another key element.

The Framework

Day One: Setting the Context

The students were asked to bring two products - one well-designed, the other poorly so. After an analysis of their functional, emotional and aesthetic qualities, they were split into five groups and asked to select one poorly designed product and re-design it to a deadline. The objects brought were highly varied ranging from obstetric forceps and an army hide rucksack to a designer cruet set, along with items like pencil sharpeners.

After presentation of their proposals, whose success was judged by popular vote, participants were introduced to some 'quick and dirty' research methods and inclusive case studies followed by a simulated experience of disability. They donned rubber gloves, taped up their fingers and smeared grease on their glasses or wore ones which simulated common eye conditions and were asked to handle the object they had just re-designed.

Then it was back to their drawing boards for yet another re-design of the chosen object with a time-delimited presentation and judging at the end. The first re-design had concentrated on style and aesthetics while the second leaned towards the importance of functional qualities. The question remained as to how to reconcile the two.

After a presentation on user-centred research methods, they were given their brief for Day Two. They had to spend the morning capturing data in a supermarket, restaurant, home environment or public transport terminal. They had to observe an individual or group interacting with a product, service or environment, document them using sketching, video ethnography still pictures and so on and then find issues that needed to be addressed in design terms.

Day Two

In the afternoon, they were shown how to isolate a key design issue from among many, build a narrative around their findings and present it in storyboard form giving the context of the person or group that inspired it. They were also introduced to the concept of multiple scenarios. This is central to understanding how a product or service inspired by disability or extreme needs can be made relevant to different groups in the population.

This is achieved by identifying how superficially dissimilar activities by diverse groups of people are linked. Once this is understood, one can build an inclusive platform for a product and enable mainstream design principles to come into play. The students six-minute presentations were again judged by popular vote.

Day Three

Their brief for the final day was to develop an inclusive design concept and present it in six minutes.

The Results

The five teams visited street markets, shopping malls and care homes and the results were accordingly varied - there were new concepts for Falafel packaging, care home service delivery.

One team based their idea on a chance encounter with a 47 year-old Arab grandmother living in Jaffa. She had invited them into her home, plied them generously with tea and described her life and feeling of isolation as an empty nester. The design team responded by devising Friends-4-U, a landline phone based service which would link her with others in her situation so that they could communicate informally at any given moment during their day by exchanging gossip, news, advice and so on.

Another team had surveyed the local shopping mall and found that mothers who wished to breast-feed their babies had no place to do so discreetly. They designed 'mbrace' - a dedicated facility within the mall, which encompassed the need for comfort, privacy and sociability.

The winning team had gone one step further than the others and produced a prototype in less than 24 hours. They had visited a street market and met an elderly woman who visited it daily with her small dog, for socialisation as well as to shop for necessities. She lived in straightened circumstances, was in poor health and the design team understood her need for an inexpensive product that would combine the functional qualities of a shopping trolley with an integrated seat. Enterprisingly, they retrieved a discarded trolley from a skip, fixed a seat to it and then welded hooks to the side, from which shopping bags could be hung.

Conversations with their key user had convinced them that even where a perfect product could be designed and manufactured, it was unlikely that she would be able to afford it. Showing her how to improvise within the context of what she owned was thus the most inclusive solution.

The results were judged by industrial designer Ofer Zick, the design historian Mel Byars and Julia Cassim of Inclusive Business RCA.