The story about baby boomer and an elegant design for them

Design for Baby Boomers Design for Dignity 2.

Utilize research methods within the design development process to develop meaningful, commercially viable products for Baby Boomers as they head into senior citizenship.

What does it mean to design for dignity?

Feel Old

With products for aging populations so frequently designed out of necessity, design has the tendency to make people “feel old” and, ultimately, devalued or disrespected.

Confidence

Products should be designed in a way that include the aging population, and affirm their confidence and dignity.

Research

Interviews

Interviewees are aged between 57 to 81 which included teachers, veterans, engineers, designers, administrators and more.

8 females

9 males

Insights

Interviewees were asked to rank our Primary Source Research Insights by level of importance in their lives, and to rank each of our individual concepts.

Health

Productivity

Community

Technology

Cleaning

Initial concepts

Feedback from seniors on

Initial Concept Ideas were shared with the users and they were asked to vote on the concept they liked the most

My concept is a transformable vacuum cleaner. It can change the type between regular type and L type to assist the users to reach specific areas, which are hard for them to reach, like under the sofa.

Market Research

What we can access on current market is the vacuum cleaner with mutiple joints to clean specific place, extensible tube, replacable cleaning head for different place, changable tube for different place or releaseable small one from main body. All of them allows user to reach more place in the house but there is no one similar with L shape vacuum cleaner can reach the lower place. If the transforming process is simple like just press a button, maybe the new L shape vacuum cleaner will be better than current products.

1. mutiple joints 2. extensible tube 3. replacable cleaning head 4. changable tube 5. releaseable body

1

2 3

4 5

User Testing

Manually folding the inner tube into inside of outer tube need users bend their back to complete whole process of operation.

Press the button to release the inner tube to allow it slide down automatically is simple but the process of sliding is not smooth and also hard to fold it back.

Seniors don’t mind to lift the outer tube to pull the inner tube out as long they don’t raise their arm too high.

Final Design

Idevelop the volume and appearance after decide the operate type. Then did VR sketches to confirm details.

Operating

Transforming to the L type by grabbing the button under the dust box to unlock the internal tube and then pull it out.

Fold the tube back by doing the same way but without pressing the button to allow the tube lock automatically.

Regular Type

Operating Regular Type

Lifting Transforming

Operating L Type

Features

Accordion tube allows users to elongate and fold the device.

Dust box

Grasp here to unlock the mechanism by pressing this button and lift the tube to transform.

Unlock button of the dust box.

By rotating the blue knob, power on and off the device.

Mechanism

The track on the outer tube does not run through at the bottom. Therefore it can hold the inner tube at the bottom.

The springs be screwed on the red metal part, and return the button after the button be pressed.

There is a hook connect with button and allows the inner tube be released after the button is pressed.

Exploded View

dust box

accordion tube

outer tube

inner tube

cover for the joint