Portfolio shushiki@me.com
Zixi
Zhu
Project 1 How to reduce sugary drink consumption among teenagers by promoting water?
Project Summary and Objective Overweight and obesity have become prevalence among teenagers in recent years across UK. More than 1 in 3 teenager aged 11–15 years are overweight or obese and obesity levels have tripled in 15 year-olds over the last ten years. Research has shown sugary drink consumption would increase body fat, and young people are main consumer of sugary drinks.
Project Objective The objective of this project is to promote water cosumption among teenagers and therefore decrease their sugary drinks intake.
Project Audience 11-15 years old UK teenagers
Individual Interviews Find audiences include both mainstream and 'extremes' assures that the result of my research can be representative for the whole group. Include different age from 11 to 15 years old, different gender, different ethnicity, different household income.
3 Slim Kids
3 Average Kids
3 Overweight Kids
I conducted semi-structured interview with 9 individuals, which can deeply engage participants around the topic I want to investigate while enabling more stories come out to let me gain deeper insights.
Self Documentation Self documentation is a powerful method to let participants document their own life to let researcher gain firsthand, visual informations. 'What people say is not always what they are actually doing everyday. ' Using this research method gives me a scope of what is happening on their daily basis.
I prepared some disposable cameras with tasks written on the back and gave to participants to ask them help me document themselves around the topic.
After which I went back to the field with developed photos and review these photos together with participants, to let them tell me the stories behind each image. During this process, I have found many unexpected things from my own understanding of the pictures.
In context immersion Because what people say is not always what they are actually doing, I decided to choosed 3 places to immerse myself in the context to see what are teenagers really doing. The 3 places are a leisure center, a cafeteria in a secondary school, several corner shops near secondary schools.
Leisure Centre During the immersion in leisure center, I spend 6 weeks times every Tuesday and Saturday with a junior badminton club. I found some kids would bring their own drinks to the court. For example, Ronnie bring squash from home because he thinks his body needs some sugar when active. And boys tend to buy sports drinks like Lucozade and Redbull while girls prefer vitamin water and juice to give themselves supplements. Another key finding is they are quite competitive between each others, and yearn to win. And boys are keen on little tricks in terms of badminton skills, trying to stand out.
School Cafeteria I also went to a cafeteria in a local secondary school during their lunch time, many kids are usually having a soft drink like juice along with the meal. And I have also found that there is no vending machines inside the school. When a stranger like me holding a camera in the school, kids are very curious about who I am and what I am doing.
Corner Shops When interviewing kids individually, the corner shop is the most popular place they would buy their drinks, so I decided to go to the corner shop and see what is happening there. The popularity of corner shop is because of its avalability, they are everywhere. I went to 5 corner shops near two different secondary schools from different regions(Holloway and Isle of Dogs). And the things I have found in common were quite surprising. The variety of bottled water(healthier option) is very limited while the sugary drinks option is enormous, even more than a local supermarket.
Identify Patterns After learned from my audience, I wrote down interesting stories and inspiring patterns I have identified during my research on the post-it notes, and organise them by person.
Find Themes In order to find the connection between the information I have collected, I tried to explore the commonalities, differences and relationships between the patterns identified. After several times of group and re-group, I finally found four main themes: Conveniency, Conformity, Value and Incentives.
Conveniency
Value
Conformity
Incentives
Insights After uncovered four main themes which affecting the choice young people are making, I then transform each theme into an insight statement which could best represent it. Based on each insight statements, I then convert them into opportunity areas to inspire possible ideas and solutions using a How Might We question.
Kids tend to use the Ready Services rather than provide themselves.
Conveniency
Conformity
How Might We create ready services for kids to consume water?
Drinking sugary drinks are sometimes considered as Social Norm among kids. How Might We create ways to make water more popular among kids?
Many kids never buy bottled water, as water is considered as Free Resource.
Value
Incentive
How Might We find new ways to facilitate free water consumption?
Kids consume sugary drink partly because they just want to Treat Themselves. How Might We add incentives to water consumption?
Idea Highlight Using the opportunity areas I have created in the last step, I then come up with many whether practical or unrealistic ideas and choose a promising idea from them. With the prototype on hand I went back to kids, parents and teachers and ask them for feedbacks.
Gamifying school water consumption This idea is to bringing gamification to the existing school drinking fountain by add competition and game senario to it, in order to make drinking water more playful and enjoyable among kids. The insight comes from my observation during leisure centre immersion that kids in this age are quite competitive and yearn to win.
Feedback from teenagers: "It looks really fun, I'd like to have a try." "I like the idea of competition."
Feedback from teacher: "I like this idea, we also use gamification in our teaching quite a lot, but kids do not care about each class, Boys VS Girls would work better."
Prototyping Considering the suggestion from the secondary school teacher, I develop the drinking fountain game idea into boys VS girls scenario for some iterations.
In order to make the prototype more appealing to teenagers, I also designed a name and identity for the game.
Live Prototyping To put my idea in the real world context, I need to develop my rapid prototype into live prototype with a 'higher resolusion' which the user could actually engaged in the game. The heart of the Fountain Fighter test model is Arduino parts and the exterior is made of MDF wood board.
Test in School I proposed my design to George Green's School in Isle of Dogs, London, and they allow me to run a live prototype in their school to test and gather feedbacks. The test is quiet successful, over the one day test, over 60 teenagers have used the fountain, while the number before in a typical day is less than 20. It can really boost the usage of the fountain. And I also gather lots of feedbacks during the test.
Feedbacks The Good Without surprise, kids like it, they are so excited and try to figure out what is this and how to play. And they are convinced by the competition between boys and girls, just like the teacher I interviewed said, they are try to beat each others all the time.
The Bad Some kids at first don't know how does the game work until I explan to them. Some technical details of the prototype have little problems and frastrate kids which need further improvement.
The Unexpected Some kids just drink too much water to win the game, however drink too much water is on the contrary not good for health. Some kids are getting so excited that they don't even see the instruction so they don't know how the game work. Some kids ask me what is it for? They don't understand why there is a competition in drinking water.
Future Iterations During the test I found many problems and collected tons of feedbacks towards the live prototype, which need future iterations.
Technical Improvement In terms of technical part, the game needs to intergrate better with the drinking fountain to improve functions such as detect the water consumption and the push button with switch.
Game Scenario Development A well considered game scenario can keep the player's passion and engage more players. Epic meaning and calling would improve the user experience.
Reward Mechanism To keep a long term success in this model, reward mechanism is also critical. I designed Fountain Fighter water bottle and stationeries as reward for the daily/ weekly winner.
The futher plan of this project is to propose this idea to the government to have this machine installed in more schools, and an online platform could play a vehicle in both game scenario developing and knowledge spreading.
Project 2 Duanwu Package design
The inner packing Zongzi (rice dumplings) is a traditional Chinese food, which is made by bamboo leaves to wrap around the sticky rice, and it looks like a tetrahedron, imitating an ox horn because ox horns were worshiped as psychic items by our ancestors. The way of using leaves to wrap food resembles the nature of packing. I tried to restore the feature of sticky rice wrapped by bamboo leaves in the design of single rice dumpling’s packing.
The outer packing The folk convention of eating rice dumplings and racing dragon boats is gradually formed in honor of the drowning of the patriotic poet. The shape of the dragon boat is like a ship with two side tips higher than the middle board, according to this; I modeled a dragon boat and abstracted its structure so as to design the dynamic boat-shape outer packing, namely, the aside two inner packing of the rice dumplings would be unfolded slowly while the outer packing was opening.
Step1
Step2
Step3
Tea + Zongzi Rice dumpling is made by sticky rice, but the sticky rice is difficult to be digested. While tea is helpful for digesting, so if the rice dumpling were made by mixing different kinds of fillings and tea together, it would be more healthy, and it would also embody the Chinese food culture.
Project 3 VANS Exhibition design
The general concept As a sports brand, the key of the external shape design should be sporty. Once I visited Guangzhou Grand Theatre, the sharp contrast between grand halls and the pony ones and the frequent use of triangle and inclined plane items impressed me deeply.
The exhibition stands What differs VANS from the other sports brands is its promoting to skateboarding. The entry path of the inner form is VANS Skate Park’s ramp; it reappears in the exhibition hall after some distortion.
The original model
Extract element
The inspiration for exhibition stand and exhibition elements results from the analysis and distortion of the skate park’s stair, ramp, L-shaped and U-shaped slide.
Distortion
The exhibition layout According to their functions, the exhibition hall is divided into four areas: brand culture exhibition area, brand products exhibition area, interaction area, and rest and talk area. These areas are divided by the popular brand cultural walls, so the whole exhibition hall is a semi-enclosed space. Function Division
Visitor Flow Analysis
The exhibition hall makes use of multimedia to interact with visitors, and the visitors also can know about the brand’s culture and history by themselves. Considering that most of the customers are young people, Wii game console is a relatively fashionable exhibition method. It makes the visitors experience skating by playing games and leaves them an impression of fashion.
Effect drawings
Like Digital Media.
Project 4
Like Digital Media Brochure design Like Digital Media is a shoreditch based design agency and is going to expand its bussiness to the Chinese market. I was point to create a brochure for the local market, my work includes initiating the content structure, execute the idea and translating into local language.