#design-process

Great reflection on what designers should always keep close to their heart in their work. From the ever thoughtful Intercom blog at http://insideintercom.io/how-we-design-at-intercom/

1. Understand the problem

2. Understand what a good outcome looks like, and how to measure it

3. Don’t make any assumptions around user behaviour or data

4. Research how other products solve similar problems

5. Decide whether our requirements are different

6. Come up with many ways we could solve the problem

7. Iterate, iterate, iterate

8. Work systematically from level to level, don’t mix levels

9. Optimise for simplicity

"Maker Tales” is an ongoing series on knowable, where we highlight outstanding Makers and their projects.

Maker Takes: Open Mirror. – 2.4.2014, by kryobot

Hi Juan Pablo! Great to have you here with us. Please, tell us a little bit more about your background.

My name is Juan Pablo and I work for Habit(s) Studio - a design firm from Milan, Italy. I am part of a team of industrial designers and engineers there. As a studio, we’ve been working quite a lot for ‘regular’ business clients but right now we are shifting our attention more and more to the Open-Source sector. We are designing and building a lot of DIY, Open-Source products in our own FabLab at the moment.

And you have a very cool project on knowable at the moment: Open Mirror - a music playing, Arduino powered, gesture controlled mirror! Can you tell us a bit about that? What was the idea behind it?

OpenMirror started basically with some experiments concerning gestural interfaces. Thanks to Arduino we had the opportunity to develop a such an interface relatively quickly. The results of that experimentation were pretty good - so we kept going. This lead us to the idea to use that interface in a stereo for the bathroom, that you can control without making it wet and ruining the electronics. That’s how OpenMirror came to life, basically.

If you want to control the music in your bathroom, just walk up to the mirror and use gestures to change what’s playing. You can for example just swipe beneath the mirror to change the song that’s playing or keep you hand steady in order to adjust the volume.

How do you see this project evolve in the future?

We’ve been working on this project for quite some time now. It has been going through a lot of iterations and changes. But we are pretty happy with it as it is right now. This is the version we are releasing - both, as a product and an Open-Source project on our homepage and here on knowable.

That is really interesting – what is your motivation for going Open-Source?

We are fascinated by the idea that there are other modes of producing things. Open-Source offers us a way to design and release completely new and different products. We don’t need to go ‘big scale’ and use industrial fabrication, but instead we can choose to do low volume fabrication runs and offer customizable products. It also allows us to experiment with different price points: You can get the fully assembled OpenMirror in our store, but you’ll also be able to get the self-assemble kit for a lower price. Or you just download the schematics and build it on your own - completely free. I think this is a great way to allow for diversity and customizability in your products: People who want to have an individual product can simply build it on their own.

So, are you planning to incorporate ideas from you customers?

Yes, we are certainly willing to do that. But it’s actually a bit early to say now - but I think we are watching what the community is doing very closely. I believe that this is the beauty of Open Source: The company and community are growing together.