Zipple was a group project completed for a module called ‘Human-Centred Design Engineering’ in my first year of university.
People are central to everything we design: products that we use, services with which we engage and policy we enact.
Human Centred Design Engineering is about understanding who you are designing for: what people love, want, dislike, dream of. With a focus on understanding people better and deriving insights that can be the genesis for truly innovative products. It is about making the right things (i.e. what will improve someone’s life).
The project brief was to design an intervention to enhance Personal Safety in Urban Areas.
Initially our three man group split up to work individually. During Spring term we entered the inspiration and Ideation phases. This involved conducting initially a whole lot of desk research into the initial brief I set myself:
Commuters in London.
I dived head first into user research (contextual inquiry and ethnographic fieldwork). Performing interviews with multiple users meant I could create personas and experience maps. This research was translated straight into insights and subsequently concepts in the ideation phase.
One of my very initial concepts, a backpack zipper lock with the potential for added features, was chosen to be taken forward to the next phase when we came back together as a group after much deliberation.
Entering the summer term now as a 3 man team we began the concept implementation phase, concentrating on refining and building design outcomes.
My sketching came in handy when discussing potential designs with the team during concept development, and eventually led to the form you see in the final product. As someone who had a lot of experience with CAD, I found myself in charge of drawing up the models throughout the iterative design process and generating the works-like prototype.
To manufacture the prototype our group utilised the department’s 3D printers to create a functional and to scale prototype in which to test. I produced the final CAD model for Zipple in Fusion 360 and rendered it in-situ using Keyshot.
So what is Zipple?
Zipple was born out of a project brief, the focus being enhancing the personal safety of commuters in and around London. The direction our group took was protecting commuters from theft of bag belongings reducing anxiety, fear and potential harm.
Zipple is a multi-functional lock designed for bags designed to reduce the likelihood of stolen belongings. These features include:
A flexible locking loop design -
allows the device to be placed between adjacent zippers. To unlock the device the user simply needs to enter the correct passcode using the rotating dials.
An integrated tracking chip -
sends the location of the device, hence the bag, to your phone. This can all be monitored via Zipple’s app that can display the current location in real time.
On-board alarm system -
with a built-in speaker the device can sound a powerful alarm to deter the thief from pursuing the theft. Sentry mode which can be enabled from within the app activated the alarm if the bag leaves a set radius from the user’s phone.
The final component of this project was taking our final product back to the user to secure validation and summarise our findings. Our users told us they liked the final solution and could see themselves utilising it in their everyday lives.
I cultivated my design thinking a lot in this module and realised the necessity of including users into the design process to generate an efficient iterative feedback loop.
