Background
This project was done within SMPLxDSGN, an interdisciplinary mock design studio at ArtCenter College of Design. Led by instructors Mimi Zou and Todd Masilko, SMPL's revolving class of designers simulate a design agency environment by working with mock clients over a fast-paced 14 week period.
The onset of Covid-19 expedited a transition among many to more remote lifestyles, inspiring this prompt.
Problem
Surrounded by water and with a shortage of developable land for housing, Populus has a significant percentage of its residents living in water-borne dwellings. Sailboats and anchored houseboats are both common housing solutions within the country. Our client seeks to reimagine the interior of an approximately 40' liveaboard mono-hull, such that the space could be optimized for use to live and/or work aboard for two adult residents.
Design Challenge
How might we create a space that not only eases a new user into a more minimalist lifestyle, but also heightens their everyday experience by taking advantage of what living on water has to offer?
Solution - Physical
Our boating solution, titled "Passing Cloud" is a transformative smart living system that would allow for users to change the entirety of their environment with only a few button presses. The physical product system consists of transformative furniture that provides a flexible layout for group and individual activities, and responsive lighting / adaptive window treatment that facilitate people’s dynamic movement and work activities in small spaces.
Solution - Digital
Our mobile app "Habitat" is the control hub for Passing Cloud. Habitat's primary focus is to provide users with the tools to instantly context switch their environment through either pre-defined layouts, or manually for more infrequent occasions.
Process
Our process over the 14 week period can be broken up into 3 distinct phases, with the physical and digital design work running in parallel.
Figma
Cinema4D
Twinmotion
Artboard Studio
The Passing Cloud Vessel
Habitat Control Hub
Ideation
Solution Sketching
User Journeys
Prototyping
Exploratory Research
Initial research involved learning about trends in remote living, existing waterborne vessels, advancements in waterborne residences and technology, and potential challenges of living remotely.
User Research
Due to the COVID 19 pandemic, our physical observations were limited to online vlog content, where people who live remotely share their experience in depth.
User Personas
From that research, we developed initial personas and accompanying user journeys that we used to identify problems with current remote and waterborne living. We would go on to reiterate on all of these as we learned more while identifying where users' problems typically lie.
Areas of Opportunity
While we uncovered a number of interesting problems that plague those who live on waterborne dwellings, an underlying theme that impacted everything a resident did was the lack of space.
Users found unique ways of adapting to the confines of a boat or catamaran, but were frank in that the minimal lifestyle and forced adaptation was not only a large hurdle to overcome, but likely the largest deterrent for new people looking to live on the water.\
Our defined Areas of Opportunity reflect this finding:
Approach
Before beginning work on Habitat, it was pivotal I kept in mind the goals of Passing Cloud while creating features and affordances that compliment the physical space.
Information Architecture
The blue highlighted portion of the Information Architecture indicates what was within scope given our time constraints and what was required to accomplish our overall goals
While creating low fidelity wireframes my goal was to explore various ways in which a user might accomplish 2 primary goals:
Usability Testing
My goal while usability testing was to ensure that the controls and affordances provided were both easy to understand and memorable.
The feedback we received from our 8 participants on the above wireframes highlighted the shortcomings of using a 3D graphic as the interface for a complex space where the user's location may vary.
Our second approach below, where we translated the 3D space into 2D graphics had more positive feedback, but still proved difficult to understand by users given how alike different pieces of furniture are.
High-Fidelity
Our High-Fidelity UI's pulled from everything we had learned, as we implemented more user friendly controls and affordances while still implementing a 3D element that better oriented a user to what exactly they were making changes to.
Visual Design
While the scope of our high-fidelity UI's and visual design was small (roughly 3 days from beginning to end), we still made it a point to create a foundational style guide that could be further fleshed out at a later date.
Takeaways
My primary takeaway over the course of this project was how to work alongside designers with far different backgrounds and skillsets than myself. I now firmly believe that getting the most out of your teammates while enabling them to do work that they're proud of requires far more listening than doing.
