The three-day Challenge Workshop for bathroom and kitchen manufacturer TOTO was led by Senior Research Fellow Julia Cassim. It engaged with 36 participants from across TOTO’s design, engineering and marketing divisions.
The workshop followed a similar three-day exercise with TOTO in summer 2006. Once again the format was a cross-disciplinary immersion in inclusive design, with a focus on collaborating with disabled users to trigger new product and service ideas as part of blue-sky innovation.
The aim was to build new collaborative networks across different disciplines within TOTO, and to develop innovative new concepts for their growing portfolio of system kitchens, against the background of a rapidly ageing population in Japan.
The workshop was split between two sites. At TOTO’s Universal Design R&D Centre, participants worked with consumers with disabilities to establish the ergonomic parameters and understand their needs and aspirations. Then they went to the company’s Mobara factory to translate these into new concepts with the benefit of the expertise of staff there.
For their final exercise, participants were invited to design an innovative feature for TOTO’s existing kitchen range or a new kitchen concept for the year 2015.
The results are confidential but what can be reported is that they were a testament to the innovative thinking that the Challenge Workshop format seems to inspire in professional designers and engineers worldwide.
