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Master's Projects

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    Interaction Design and Product Design of IoT Kitchen Central Hub for North American Market
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020-07) Lu, Xinyang
    Kitchen is an essential place in our home for food preparation, cooking and having fun activities. According to the market research report from Grand View Research (2015), the global smart kitchen appliances market is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 25% from 2015 to 2022. North America is expected to hold major share in the smart kitchen appliances market. The future of small kitchen appliances is built upon new technologies, and it needs to fit in people’s lifestyles. Based on some initial research, a few future trends were identified, including connection, health cooking, sensing and computing, and interaction. Connection is based on the high-speed development of IoT (Internet of Things). Platform and products embedded and connected with IoT enable the users to control and monitor the household appliances through mobile and digital applications. In addition, these IoT kitchen appliances allow users to improve eating habits, with the help of an abundance of healthy recipes. New cooking methods such as Pressure-cooking and Sous-vide prove to be healthier compared to traditional cooking methods. Sensing and interactive allow users to control their cooking processes with accuracy and thoroughness. With these future trends and an increasingly growing market, there’s a great potential of design opportunities in this market. This research includes the product design and the interactive prototype of the kitchen central hub. It also includes several rounds of comprehensive user research and user testing. The outcomes of this research prove the promising future of IoT kitchen central hub for North American market. Possibility of further improvement is discussed in this end.
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    Examining Virtual Reality As An Empathizing Tool For Early Ideation Stage in Design
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2020) Velasquez, Alex C.
    Whenever there is a new design project to undertake, one of the first and most important steps is to empathize and immerse oneself into the design brief early in the design process in order to gain a better understanding of the problem space and be able to create concepts that accurately target the design context. Some of the traditional tools employed by industrial designers include; sketching, storytelling, journey/mind mapping, persona exploration, post-it note brainstorming, role-playing and field observation. However, some of these tools in the early stages of the design process rely heavily on the designer's imagination, assumption or prior knowledge of the design context which could be flawed, inaccurate or not current. Other methods such as field observation or traditional research requires effort and time and as far as field observation goes, certain elements, behaviours or other factors may not be replicated or duplicated easily for further and thorough examination. This project aims to investigate immersive Virtual Reality as an effective tool for the early design stage compared to traditional industrial design methods. Leveraging by off-the-shelf technology, it is easy to film 360 degree videos in the context of Virtual Reality, which can capture an immersive scenario that can be replayed and reviewed by designers in order to discover problem spaces/design opportunities with empathizing the problem space. This project examined a group of participants in order to conduct a simple design challenge involving designing an external visual communication system for autonomous shuttles in the pick-up phase of shuttle riding. One team will use virtual reality to empathize with the context while the second team will use traditional methods of empathizing. The design methods as well as the designs themselves are evaluated by the participants and a third panel body including experts in industry and the general masters of industrial design student body and the evaluation scores are measured to compare the effectiveness of both virtual reality and traditional methods. Findings reveal that while traditional industrial design empathizing tools are more effective in some areas compared to Virtual Reality, V.R. was able to perform as a usable system for empathizing and offers vast potential as am empathizing tool in other more challenging design scenarios.