My HCDE 451 Final Project worked in collaboration with Han Feng.
My last project in HCDE 451 marked the culmination of all of the prototyping skills, research learnings, and ideation lessons from the class. We were given the following prompt for this last deliverable: Utilize at least two of the prototyping techniques (Assignments) we have explored in the course to prototype a solution based on the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. For the scope of our project, Han and I focused on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #3: Good Health and Well-Being & #5: Gender Equality. Moreover, we focused on Target 5.2: Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and other types of exploitation.
Our concept focuses on a wearable device that can be incorporated into users’ daily fashion outfits. This wearable will be contributing to the safety feature for females who walk at night by themselves. They will put the wearable into their daily outfit and tap on the wearable to notify their designated contacts that they are on the way somewhere. If an emergency situation happens, they can perform certain interactions, such as long presses on the surface, to notify the local authorities or their designated contacts.
https://miro.medium.com/max/1400/0*rPSfE4c0k4P6gMtQ
The primary goal of our product is to mitigate violence and assault on all women using a wearable.
We used model prototyping and video prototyping at first to explore the desirability of different fashion accessories. The model prototype consists of an earring, a bracelet, and a pin. Then we made a video prototype to demonstrate the use cases and played it in front of some potential stakeholders — students who tend to walk home alone. Here are some additional considerations when we are tailoring the product goal:
From our initial brainstorming, we came up with three avenues for a wearable that we wanted to discover further through research & testing: a bracelet, an earring, and a pin. In this initial stage of prototyping, our concept was not yet fully fleshed out. We imagined this wearable to be something that users could use different interactions with to quickly contact their friends or notify emergency services, but we did not want to dive too deeply into the “interface” or “design” of the wearable until we evaluated what was the most desirable format that users may utilize.
Combining model prototyping and video prototyping, we evaluated the desirability of our product & gathered feedback on some of the functions present. Utilizing materials such as cardboard, stickers, tape, and my old earrings, we crafted incredibly low-fidelity prototypes of our three wearables to use as artifacts in our video prototype.
Gif of the three wearables being used in our video prototype.
Together, Han and I created our video prototype to demonstrate the two possible use cases that this product could be used. The two use cases we aimed to showcase include sharing your location with the following: