Skapa is the final project for the Speculative Design class (IAT 431) in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology. During the final project, each team was asked to choose a topic and come up with a possible design in the future that would address the problem to the audience.
UX Research / Graphic Design
2018, October - December
The team consists of four people each specializes in different skills including graphic design, content writer, 3D modeller, 3D animations, and physical modelling. Every team member had the responsibility to conduct research and contribute ideas. In addition, my main role focuses on ux research, graphic design, content writing, and 3D modelling.
Skapa are blocks made out of bamboo, ferrite metal, and polypropylene. The blocks can be assembled together to make the desired furniture that the user wants. The blocks are magnetized together through the used of ferrite metal. Skapa exists in a future where there is limited living space as a result of the affordable housing crisis. In addition, the housing supply is not able to meet the increasing population in cities. In our design, Skapa aims to give people living in micro spaces the freedom to adapt their furniture to their lives throughout the day. Skapa allows users to use a single room for sleeping, eating, and living. Hence, the design aims to promote critical thinking about the living spaces in the future.
Our first initial research focused on the Nomadic lifestyle of an individual. With the Nomadic lifestyle in mind, we came up with the concept of convertible furniture for future living lifestyle in which people would often need to reposition themselves such as moving towards the outer city for financial purposes, but at the same time, moving into the crowded city for job opportunities.
From our initial concept, the focused on Nomadic lifestyle was shifted towards the living space of the residents in the city. By researching further into the living space such as micro-apartments sparks the idea of using blocks to form furniture. Using one to two weeks of more ideation and brainstorming with the team, we came up with a final design concept of Skapa blocks.
Some issues that we encountered include getting the right scale for the project based on the problems and designing the interactions of Skapa blocks. During the beginning phase of the project, we were struggling with getting the right scale for the project. Initially, we were focused on the nomadic lifestyle in which we wanted to design furniture that can be easily transported from one place to another through transformations. However, the team struggled a lot on the interactions and also the connections between the design to the problems. Therefore, we wanted to design something that when the users interact with the product, it will promote their thinking about the problems related to the housing crisis in the future. As a result, we switched our focus to living spaces.
For the interactions of Skapa blocks, we first sketched out the interactions on paper but it was still difficult to actually get the complete interactions to work. Therefore, we bring our sketches into Maya to think about the 3D spaces of the product and it made the interactions a lot more clear. At the same time, we were able to communicate our ideas more clearly to our users.
