Business and Entrepreneurship
Understanding the particularities of how a current day business is run, and identifying the gaps where innovation is possible, serve as useful skills as a designer. This is an expertise area which I especially wanted to enhance, as it was mostly in the periphery within the first academic year.
Proposed solutions visualized by Tessa Doornbos.
Cost versus Benefit
Part of bringing a product to the next level of fidelity is adding a degree of realism to the project, by framing the prototype in the context of a business. By doing so certain aspects such as cost are held to a higher regard and often influence the end result. Ultimately if a product is too expensive for the possible positives it may bring, it will more than likely not be successful. Hence when the product was selected for the redesign in the project of Human Factors, proposed solutions were developed which specifically address the problem of holding the bottle without slipping, and ran through a cost-benefit analysis. The three solutions are as follows, include a handle with the form of the bottle, include anti-slip surfaces on the current surface of the bottle, and make the bottle a dispenser instead where there is no more need to hold it. Each solve the core issue in their own manner but to derive which approach would be more effective, a more systematic analysis that breaks down the cost versus the possible benefit would suffice. Therefore, six categories of assessment were composed and weighted relative to their importance within a real world context. They were then applied to the solutions, given a score from one to five and added up. Once the overall score was determined the expected cost score was then subtracted from the total to see which solution would be the most effective. In the case of this project, according to the criteria set, the handle design would lead to the highest benefit for a reasonable cost. This process is summarized further in the video below, which explains the scoring system more in depth.