Observation of daily life
From Mod Mania
Being an industrial designer, how do you usually start off designing a new product without constrain? You cannot simply sit down and inspiration just come into you mind. Let’s try to walk around in the street, you can easily find that different people reaction differently with a same thing. Seeking inspiration from real life is an obvious method to start with. Although the existing product we have able to maintain our daily life, there still have problems we need to solve. By observing people everyday interaction, we can discover a lot about how people engage, adapt, and make sense of our surroundings. That lead us to see directly how design plays into our lives, how people actively shape the environment, and how we in turn shaped by it.
Immediate Reaction
It is an obvious fact that different object have different. However, people often use things in their way to make their life more convenience. They will interact automatically with objects and spaces that they encounter.
As mobile phone becoming parts of our life, we always make use of our time that we free. Even though we are walking on the street, we cannot miss any time to connect with your friend through text-messaging, or internet access through mobile. The man in the image is show that he is walking along the safety-line tiles, so as to draw him instinctively along the right path. This safety-line tile is originally design for the blind people, since the man is focusing on his mobile, he is kind of blind, and the soles of his feet become sensors to aid him in “walking blind”.
The classic umbrella builds in options for carrying and stowing. As the man is taking photos, he want to keep both his hands free, here’s an immediate reaction that he have, which is the idea of hanging the umbrella into his pocket. What else we can hang around our clothes?
Instants Responds
This photos show an empty milk carton places on a roadside railing. The square bottom of the milk carton matches the square shape of the railing post. It’s it a coincidence result? If the people who finish the milk and just throw on the floor, he can still enjoy the convenience he have instead of hold the empty carton until he find the bin. However, he decides to place in a certain way. Although it’s a fact that people like to think they decide everything they do, this show that the environment determines human behaviour, the environment may also move us around.
Complementing shapes, will the situations that would benefit from such obvious matches for placing a little?
Assimilating
We always want to make our life as convenience as we can; we often make use of opportunities present in our immediate surroundings. The hanger itself maybe just design for rail in your cabinet, however, the person make the linkage between the rail in his cabinet and the handrail in the train. This is how the person assimilates the idea of hanging on a rail.
It is an active storage mode; something not need now but maybe soon, therefore, it needs to be standby. The flexibility of the glasses itself contain potential of hanging in a flat surface.
When we when to gym or swimming in the pool, we usually have key for the locker. We will find our own way to solve this problem like the photo above, taking the advantage of the hole of the key itself, tied the shoelace by piercing through the key as well. It will be stable enough for exercise. It is still a nice design to have a bracelet key holder, but it could be replaced by nothing since you always have another solution that solves the same problem.
Exploiting
Have you ever experience that when you having barbeques, the plastic fork it to soft to hold food, and it running out of tissue, it’s it a good thing to reconfiguring a floppy plate around folding food. As the plate is making out of paper, the person who fold it understand the material which is easy to transform, so as to meet his objective. Here is showing people take advantage of physical and mechanical qualities we understand.
Adapting
People alter the purpose or context of things to meet their objectives. People always like multi function product. As a simple form have a wide range of methods that we can adapt. As the lady with a pencil in her hair, she extended the function for an everyday tool. When utilitarian tools do becomes wearable, taking on a personal or decorative role.
Conforming
Mod from our behaviour
There‘s a lot of design are influenced by our behaviour. Looking around things happening in our life is one of the methods that designer gaining their inspirations. A a lot of product around us, such as a pen, a water bottle; the functions are obviously writing and containing liquid. However, the relationships between people and things are never constant. Taking a pen as an example, you normally writing with a pen, however, have you ever put a pen between a book as a bookmark? Or clipping a pen to the paper ?This is an unconscious behaviour that we had, since it totally did the same function as bookmark, but a bookmark might not be with us all the time. Some designer came out an idea base on this feature, by flattening the body of the pen , people clearly perceived that the pen have a function of writing and book marking. This bookmark pen makes a more clear character and attitude, although people able to find their own way to executing the same solution of book marking problem.
By observing how people interact with the object and surrounding, people will have a automatically linkage between A and B. A and B will not have immediate relation between each other, the only thing that make A and B together is the interaction is similar. The most obvious way that we easily find out is how the creative people link A and B together is through advertising. Here’s an advertising in a train. Most of the people have the experience in holding the handle in the train. The gesture of holding the handle transfer to a gesture of hold a weight.
Mod our behaviour
Finding needs and problems in our daily life is another inspiration source for designer. There are a lot of problem we have in our daily life. We never aware the problem we have since they might not affect us much. However, the problem still existed. Some of the design is helping us to fix the problem. When your mobile phone is charging, there’s a wire to connect them. It is for sure that you can just leave your mobile phone on the floor or the table; it will create a certain obstructed problem. You can simply ignore it, but having the wire hanger, it makes your wire more organise. This is how the design modifies our behaviour.
