about
Notifications, feeds and messages, we are tired of being connected to the social media all the time. Now it’s time to get off the grid, dröm is a wireless charging lamp which provides gentle and peaceful light only when you’re charging your phone, it’s like a reward for spending less time on phones.
Simply put your phone in the charging board, the light will be turned on. So when you come back home and want to get rid of disturbing things, just leave your phone there and enjoy your own time with this wonderful vibe.
This project is based on “Industrial Design Project II” during MFA in Lund, in cooperation with IKEA with a topic “OFF THE GRID“.
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BACKGROUND
Data by Tricia Hussung, King university
The urban population is increasing in the past hundreds of years. We’re living a life full of communication, which is good, but sometimes we may be faced with something disturbing. Social media on our phone could be an example. It’s entertaining and fun to share and browse on social media, but at the same time it could be disturbing and influencing daily life if we stay on the grid of social media too much, even get addiction.
Existing study shows that people use their phone nowadays much more than we expect, which causes a series problems such as anxiety, procrastination, internet addiction, sleep deprivation and so on.
brainstorming
goal
Social media is an addictive grid and it’s too easy to get on. Our goal is to make full use of social media but not let it disturb our life in the other way. In general people use their phone too much, it’s important to get off the grid of social media, spend less time on it, stop being disturbing and communicate better with ourselves, which makes us develop a sustainable social lifestyle.
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RESEARCH
questionnaire
I used google forms doing questionnaire, and got 117 results. I tried to understand why people want to use social media and how did they find it using social media. To be fair I didn’t assume social media is the thing we need to get away, just asked some neutral question to understand how people think in a broad image.
the results shows that social media have both advantages and disadvantages for people, and most of people want to spend less time on it.
interview & forum
self-observation
I spent a whole day without any social media apps on my phone.
I still procrastinated (with some videos and speeches and music app).but it makes me spend less time on my phone, and helped me get a lot of work and errands done.
During that 24 hours, i found myself wanna use social media for 47 times.
existing products
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DESIGN PROCESS
From the research, I did understand that social media overuse could bring some problems, and also people would be willing to spend less time on their phone.
According to what people said, to let us spend less time on phones, the duable way could be providing physical or mental distance between user and phones, and providing a rewarding system would be better to have positive feedback. Here goes several possible concepts.
concept 1: meditation space - mentally off the grid
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing their mind on a particular object, thought or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state.
concept 2: focusing desk - physically off the grid
One of the reasons why people get stuck into their phone is that phone is easy to approach. What if make distract things get away from user’s view?
concept 3: wireless charging with vibe - willingly off the grid
Nowadays wireless charging technology is very popular, and ikea has also introduced a lot of furniture with wireless charger. So I want to use it to let users want to take the initiative to not touch the phone. when you charge your phone stilly there will be a good vibe to let you don't want to pick your phone again.
Compare those three concepts, i chose the last one due to the rewarding and encouraging feedback really make people willing to get off the grid for a while.
I tried to develop it based on the concept
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PROTOTYPING
wireless charging test
light test
model making
with different pieces, user can change the vibe in their own style, simply pic a base and pick a transparent acylic part.
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RESULTS
The prototype was exhibited at Milan Design Week 2019 as part of the exhibition Off The Grid(?).
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