Product and Service Design

Title: SharIN’House Keywords: co-dwelling lifestyle, sharing activities, ecosystem Description: The aim of the course is the acquisition of a systematic approach and the skills to design interactive and interconnected IoT products for shared activities among housemates in a domestic environment. The objective is to conduct in-depth research aimed at redesigning an ecosystem by leveraging data collected from everyday activities, while also acquiring fundamental principles and knowledge about IoT. Students will be tasked with both exploring and conducting practical experiments in the realm of innovative interactive products and services connected by IoT. In particular, the course is a team-based Design studio focused on the exploration of contemporary shared living scenarios, where housemates engage in various collaborative activities. These activities will be categorized into three key areas: needs (e.g. household management), responsibilities (e.g. shared tasks), and leisure (e.g. recreational activities), taking place across three different contexts: householding (like cooking or cleaning), living (like studying or eating), and personal care in shared places (like bathing). As we expect that most of the students are already experiencing co-dwelling situations, the course will direct effects on the real-world of the students in which they will design technologically advanced solutions that apply IoT to create an ecosystem of products enabling new forms of interaction between objects, people, and shared spaces that could be directly experimented by themself. Students will experiment with interactive products and services, while also considering the environmental context, the cultural dynamics of shared living, the technological possibilities, and, most importantly, the ecosystemic implications of their interventions. Expected Results: The students will engage with real-world scenarios of shared living environments and will conduct their project along three key phases: Research, Prototyping, and Final Design. During the Research phase, students will utilize a comprehensive tool of analysis and adopt an interdisciplinary approach to retrieve first data from the ecosystem, including everyday objects and interactions within shared spaces. During the Prototyping phase, students will start the building scenarios by conducting collaborative design tests, simulations through rough prototyping and iteration processes. In the Final Design phase, students will synthesize observations from the previous phases to design an interactive product system capable of utilizing data to prompt reflections on shared responsibilities, daily habits, and collective values.

Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby (2013) Speculative everything. The MIT Press Tim Brown (2009) Change by design. Harper