Wearables Search Engine
Project Background
In developing areas like Wearable Technology, It is common to have a multidisciplinary community trying to innovate. Due to differences in methodology, fashion designers, engineers, material scientists, or artists can experience gaps or breakdowns during their development process and while collaborating.
This situation makes wearables development challenging, even more so when technologies are in the early stages of development and their technological and cultural potential is not fully understood.
The objective of this project was first to understand the exact limitations of multidisciplinary collaboration during the wearables design process. These insights will allow us to define a method to enhance communication, ideation, and design of innovative wearables.
Study Details
Research Questions
Participants
Methodology
Preliminary Studies
1
- How do designers communicate across disciplines?
- What are the main barriers to understanding and description?
- What is the most common design workflow?
- 10 Participants (6F / 4M)
- Multidisciplinary Background
- 30 minutes
- West Lafayette, IN
- Design workshop. interview, think-aloud
- Participants used bodystorming and fast prototyping as the method of ideation to desing wearables.
Development
2
Multidisciplinary Design Task
3
- Is there a difference in ideaas created when using the system?
- How much information does the system allows to access?
- Are the vocabulary barrier and accessibility issues eliminated?
- 24 Participants (13F/11M)
- Divided in 2 groups
- 1-10 years of experience
- Multidisciplinary backgrounds
- 25 minutes each task
- Indiana and Berlin
- Experiment, Drawing, survey.
- Participants were divided in a control group and an exploratory group (used the system) .
The participants had 2 tasks:
1) Ideation task to design as much wearables as possible
2) Design development - to develop further a selected desing from the ideation task.
Experts Enquiry
4
- What challenges were identified in terms of vocabulary, resources, and interface?
- What are the insights expressed by experts from different areas that can ensure users satisfaction in a multidisciplinary community?
- 13 Participants (9F / 4M)
- Multidisciplinary Background
- No time limit
- Multiple countries
- Open questionaire
- Free exploration of the system to gain insights of usability, challenges, vocabulary, and resources.
Unsupervised User Study
5
- Were the changes implemented efficient?
- Were students able to the system without help or tutorials?
- Are there additional comments and feedback?
- 17 Participants
- Multidisciplinary Background
- No Time limit
- Unmoderated usability study, questionaire.
- Berlin, Germany
- Participants were requred to use the system as search method to develop a desing proposal for a wearable garment.
Results
Using conventional search methods
Using new system
55.25 %
more concept ideas
Eliminated vocabulary barrier during search
314%
Invrement in the number of resources accessed and used with the system