this is the target market ive decided to design my product for.
PARENTS OF LARGE FAMILIES
AGE. 25-55.
FAMILY SIZE. 4+ family members. ( average use of 150-200Ltrs per person a day ).
SALERY. £27,000.
Money conscious.
My target market live in or near water stressed regions of the UK, they have a water meter installed but find it difficult to keep any eye on how much they use due to the size of the family and the positioning of their water meter.
so to kick off my project I conducted some primary research via the means of questionnaires. The focus behind these questionnaires was to find out how/where/and why people waste water on a day to day basis and to see if there’s any existing incentive to reduce water wastage . My first questionnaire was 10 Questions long and asked the respondents questions such as ‘do you currently try to reduce your water wastage?’ and ‘specify how you currently do this’. the results from that questionnaire where good however I only had 22 respondents all between the ages of 18-24 and 35-44. from this first questionnaire I found out that large families with water meters installed (you only pay for the water you’ve used) find it difficult to keep an eye on their water usage and wastage. I found out that people would be happy to buy a product that reduces their water wastage as long as its a good price and in the long run saves them money, so there is some incentive to reduce wastage. after collecting the results from that questionnaire I made a new one. in this questionnaire I concentrated on the bathroom and more especially the shower and bath. I had a massive 82 responses which gave me a wide variety of answers. the main questions:
how many days a week do you shower? the average amount was 7 (once a day)
how long do you spend in the shower? the average amount of time was 10/15 minutes, however some answers where as high as 30mins and as lo as 3mins. (an average 5min shower would usually use 50ltrs of water) so if people have 30min shower they’d be using 200ltrs of water which is equivalent to average daily intake of water per person in America.
do you ever shower more than once a day? 55% said yes. which is higher than I thought considering I never have two in a day. as a follow up to this question, I asked how many times in a typical week would you shower more than once a day? and the average answer was once or twice. however some people admitted to 7 times ( so they shower twice a day all week, using an average of 1400ltrs of water a week just showering).
So today we decided to look at architects to inspire our work, the first architect I would like to tell you about is Lebbeus Woods, at a certain stage in his career he moved his work more towards experimental projects, such as the little underground pieces he did (below) I really like the idea of his work and he makes the idea of underground cities not such a silly idea however it would be a difficult idea to execute because if you excavate the earth away from underneath big heavy buildings that are already situated on the surface they will surly fall inwards unless there is some sort of structure that can withstand the strain of the weight, I think we would like to used his style and in our work to help us work towards a final out come.
we also looked at Giovanni Piranesi, who did work about and underground type city, we felt like his work was very inspirational; towards what we want to achieve.
Joey- meAT design Research.
Research in to transtechnology by Plymouth University.
You can think of se researchers as deep holes where they know a lot about a fraction of something or there is shallow research however it’s abit wide so it means they can know a little bit about a lot of things, this lecture is about a disturbed child called “Joey” and he is looked after by a disturbed child cater called bethelhine, Joey is a mechanical boy, he converts himself into a machine to fit in with a mechanical community/society, they said he was schizophrenic an autistic and is massively part of the cyborg community, he basically think he is a mechanised creature. I thinks he’s a isolated creature connected to the world by wires, picture bethelhine described his theory of the “carr” the top one is a pure machine which is what Joey think he is, the middle on is Joey not being the machine but occupying the machine and the last one is him cured him separating him self from the machine world and becoming a human being,
but as we know this can not happen and it is believed that he just lived his life normally after this, however he has never been seen by another Human except Bethelhine which suggests that he
Doesn’t exists that he made it all up!
super complexity
It is not solve by simplicity and is defiantly not solved by fundamentalism, but you have to except that things are not solved, thing are at best ambiguous and always contingent upon something else which means everything you know is and is not right, so the idea of research the old idea would be a researchers office would look clean and tidy however the new idea is that the office should be a massive mess, which is super complexity but it means that you have everything to come back to if you find out that it’s useful!
I found his whole lecture very very interesting however this was the part that interested me the most even know he slowly crept back to the Joey story,
Obesity rates in Britain are at a concern with almost a quarter of British adults being classed as obese and almost a quarter of students putting on two stone during university.
The government has issued warnings that us as a nation are upon the verge of a obesity epidemic, the the main cause for such a high increase of obesity is our relationship with fatty door has because more strong and we find it easier to order a take away than to just cook or make a healthy meal, another factor for this increase is caused by supermarkets and they just keep increasing the price of healthier foods and making microwaveable meals, such a as curry, cheaper and as obese adults can not get a job because they don’t have the physique to to carry out a hard working job which therefore means they can not afford healthier foods.
Obesity has become a massive problem for the NHS and the government as they have to pay out for specialised doctors and cares to take professional care of them on a daily basis, obesity was costing the NHS 4.2 billion pounds in 2007 and it is estimated to rise to 6.2 billion pounds by the year of 2015, and the NHS predict that by the year of 2050 half of the U.K. population will be obese, this figure is almost twice as much as what it is costing the NHS for the care of alcoholics and smokers.
Becoming a Designer. 