Designers
Chuman(Rachel) Zhang, Nils Achenbach, Yuan Tian, Erik Ivarson
Year
2024
Category
New Talent
Country
Sweden
School
Umeå Institute of Design
Teacher
Thomas Degn
Three questions for the project team
What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
UX challenge will be thinking about how to blend the sound design and physical design well together. For example, do they speak the same design languages? Since it is quite a short time, 3 weeks project, we don’t really have time to think about whether to create a design system first or not. Therefore, the whole UX flow may not be as complete as we want to be. But we are still quite happy about it.
What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
We had a lot of fun in the development process in the team. Our aha!- moment happened when we realized we don’t have to create an app from scratch, we thought about what people are already using. People are already using Spotify, so why not using the plugin instead. Trying to not designing things just because we want to, but to see if it is necessary first. This also applies to our physical products, we designed earphones for people who do not have wireless earphones yet, but people who have them can also buy the sensor on the back and download our Spotify plugin.
Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
As a team, we hope that this idea could be in the real market even it is a student project. Actually we want to do some iterations on our existing designs as a team. For example, the sensor at he back right now is magnetic, we want to make a 2.0 version, like a running belt along the chest area since one of our group member is a marathon runner and through his feedback, we realized that might be a potential 2.0 solution. For the software side, we are hoping to be able to collaborate with Spotify and actually create a our plugin with them with their design language seamlessly. As a group, we are an ambitious of four, and can see ourselves as designers who add value and make people’s lives easier and happier in our ways.